


Daria Makes A Deal

by Blake C Stacey (BlakeStacey)



Series: The DMAD Discontinuum [1]
Category: Daria (Cartoon), The Sandman (Comics)
Genre: Academic Job Market, Bisexuality, But I Repeat Myself, Depression, Gender-Neutral Pronouns, Infidelity, Kink, Multi, Post-Canon, Psychological Horror, Recreational Drug Use, Trans Female Character
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2016-09-29
Updated: 2018-07-17
Packaged: 2018-08-18 14:22:38
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 11
Words: 47,722
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/8165015
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/BlakeStacey/pseuds/Blake%20C%20Stacey
Summary: Present Day. Present Time.AH HAHAHAHAHAHAHA!— Serial Experiments LainAre dolphins making self-glorifying edits on Wikipedia?Cetacean needed, next on #SickSadWorld!It’s thirteen years after high school, and Daria Morgendorffer is eager to turn her life around. Standing for her principles put a serious crimp in her academic career, and finding out that her fiancé was less than faithful brought a definitive end to her domestic plans. She wants to start over, but her best chance to do so is to seize an opportunity that is fantastic in all the wrong ways…





	1. Chapter 1

IT WAS the first Saturday of 2013, and Daria Morgendorffer felt like Hell.

She watched the roadside from the passenger seat. A food-and-fuel plaza appeared in the distance down the turnpike, then grew and slipped past her window. A row of parked semi trucks fanned out in a momentary peacock of parallax, which closed up again as the exit lane of the plaza merged into the highway and vanished behind them.

"You didn't have to drive me," Daria told her sister. "I _am_ capable of planting myself on a train for a few hours."

"Oh, come _on,_ " said Quinn Morgendorffer. "Like I would make you bother with all that. I mean, I know that writers love trains on general principles, but you'd have to schlep all your stuff from South Station to wherever it is Jane is staying, whereas I can provide door-to-door luggage service." Quinn pointed her thumb over her shoulder, back towards the trunk of the Prius. "Besides, I'd love to spend a night in Boston, and on the way back I can have brunch with my fellow podcasters and make a working trip of it."

 _—My little sister Quinn,_ thought Daria. _—Quinn who is Regional Director of Quality Assurance for a sporting-goods company so well-known even I recognized the name. Quinn who cohosts a podcast that teaches young women about mathematics. Quinn, married and trying for a kid._

"And double besides," Quinn went on, "I like helping people move into new places, you know? All the mundane stuff, like buying salad tongs and figuring out how to do the laundry, it, you know, becomes special again."

_—Quinn, who might not have an absolutely perfect life, but who is on top of things. Who, in fact, got all the able-to-stand-on-two-feet genes. Who is, let's face it, Mom, but with better work-life balance and bouncier hair._

"Jane says they have on-site laundry," Daria said.

"And you get to live with Jane again! How awesome is that?"

"And here it turns out I'm riding in a time machine," Daria deadpanned, "and I didn't even notice when we hit eighty-eight."

_—Except that since the last time Jane and I shared a place, things have… reversed._

Quinn looked away from the road momentarily, shot a quick smile at Daria, then returned her gaze to the highway.

"Jane said we could meet her at her work, right?" asked Quinn.

"She only gave me the one address," Daria replied, "and she said she'd be working this afternoon, so I guess that's what we do. Which means _you_ get to experience the joys of driving, not just through Boston, but _Somerville_ too."

"Ha," Quinn said. "Put on the power playlist, would you? We're going to need a strong sound going into this."

* * *

"Nicely done in the rotary," Daria said. "I thought it was very neat, how you got around those two buses."

"What two buses?"

They were near the address which Jane had given. By all appearances, it was in a light-industrial corner of town. The businesses, in buildings of dingy and sometimes sooty red brick, all had a definite closed-for-the-weekend look, save those which might have been closed since the recession hit.

Daria mused aloud. "So this is where they manufacture used air conditioners."

"In _my_ town," Quinn replied, "the used air conditioners are hand-crafted and _artisanal._ " 

Daria looked down at her sleek new phone.

"Your destination will be on the left," she said.

Quinn's head swiveled to port. "So it is!" She bopped the turn signal with the heel of her hand, then slowed the car and swung the wheel. They rounded the curb into a parking lot, roughly half full.

The lot fronted two brick buildings, side-by-side. The one on the left was a single storey, judging by the windows, but with a high roof. The building on the right poked above its companion with three extra floors. A narrow walkway between them had been covered over with new metal construction, and a shallow ramp led up to the glass door set into it. A sign on the taller building said, in a typeface which made Daria think of the good ship _Enterprise_ in the original movies: MOONBASE ILLYRIA.

"This is the place," Quinn said. She parked the car in a spot on the street side of the lot and pushed the power button. "Hope she's here."

Daria unfastened her seatbelt and reached to the floor space beside her seat, where she had kept her winter coat. She leaned forward to pull it on, then stepped out of the car and immediately zippered her parka.

They crossed the lot, Quinn at a light jog and Daria more sedately, and approached the door.

"Buzzer, or try her cell phone?" asked Quinn.

Daria heard the running of booted feet behind her. She had turned partway in the direction of the sound when its source met her in a flying hug which carried her into Quinn, who was then caught up in the embrace in turn.

"No need," said Jane Lane.

 _—Still tall and lithe and fleet, I see,_ thought Daria. _—Still with the bluest eyes I've ever seen, set in that angular heart of a face which has driven boys and girls to distraction lo these many years._

"Hi Jane," Daria said, into Jane's onyx-black asymmetric bob.

Jane gave them both an extra squeeze before disengaging. "I was around by the loading dock when you two came in," she said. "By Gad, it's good to see you."

_—Still my best and oldest friend._

"So this is what happened to the movie-prop-making company?" Quinn asked.

"Yup," Jane replied. "Farrell Multinational set up a trust endowment thing in some patron-of-the-arts shenanigans, and we moved up here from Providence to expand." She rubbed her hands, which Daria now saw were bare and starting to turn red. "How's about we carry on inside, then? Let's go get your stuff!"

"Wouldn't it be a wasted effort," Daria asked, "to carry the bags in and then carry them out again when we go to your apartment?"

Jane canted her head sideways. "I guess I didn't get everything across by e-mail after all," she said. "Come on inside. You'll love it!" From an inside coat pocket she pulled out a prox card, which she slapped against a sensor panel beside the door. The entrance unlatched with a solenoid thump. Jane swung it open and ushered them inside.

* * *

The rubberized mat on the linoleum floor, the bulletin board tacked up with Title IX notices and instructions on phoning cab companies, the vending machines at the far end of the hall: everything conjoined to remind Daria of a place where one waited for an auto dealer to complete warranty repairs. The squeal of a saw munching through something heavy streamed out through the door to their left.

"Set construction job," Jane explained, "kind of came down to the wire. Got to make furniture for the baddies to destroy when the federales bust the joint." She waved them down the hall and through another door, one leading to their right.

Daria's first impression was that a bicycle shop had run away with a mannequin warehouse and raised a child who aspired to become a bank robber. "We're kind of overbooked at the moment," Jane said, leading them past an unoccupied reception desk, around a beaverboard partition and onto the shop floor. She grabbed a burlap sack from a nearby workbench, reached inside and tossed something from inside at Daria. It slipped past her hands and bounced into her chest, where she trapped it in her arms.

"Money?" she asked.

Quinn peeked into the bag. "At least fifty large." She flipped through one of the rubber-banded stacks. The inside bills were blank.

"All to be destroyed in the third act," Jane said. "Come on, elevator's this way."

Daria inquired, "You guys do a bit of everything, I guess?"

"Along with some other stuff. Custom mechanical design and prototyping, sometimes, but that's not really my job. Some of our specialized tooling, we rent out to local makerspaces. Sweet Jesus, this town is _crawling_ with makerspaces. Oh, this is kinda neat—" From another table they passed, she snagged a small metal item.

"Cigarette lighter?" Quinn guessed.

Jane nodded. "Some people Farrell knows are throwing an unironical _Great Gatsby_ party. He made sure we got the deal to provide tchotchkes at properly immodest fees."

"If that's the case," Daria said, "I hope that's just your prototype, because it's not nearly tacky enough."

Jane grinned and beckoned them onwards.

"Over in the short wing is where we keep the heavy machining stuff, for sawing and milling and welding and lathe-ing. This side is more geared for soldering, 3D printing, painting. And now—into the big metal box, Morgendorffers!"

The steel doors closed, and the freight elevator rumbled upwards. A bell chimed outside.

"Second floor: camera testing, where the movie magic happens! No, we don't film porn here. But we're not above providing the set decorations."

Ding.

"The third floor is still under development. We're, you know, conceptualizing the possibilities. Mostly right now it's where we store the molds for replica food."

Ding.

"A-and the top of the heap! Directly ahead, the Moonbase gallery."

The first thing Daria saw was the hardwood floor. It was a nice floor: new, even, polished. Her attention worked its way upwards, and she took in the walls, spotless and soothingly eggshell. Paintings, not too closely crowded together, each illuminated by mild track lighting. Sculptures in wood and metal and glass, on pedestals or hanging from the I-beams which ran just under the ceiling.

"Oh my gosh," Quinn said. "This place is amazing!"

"Be a shame if something happened to it," Jane said, in her best gangster voice. "We use this space for showcasing what our people can do. Also for a Girls Who Code event and an antique pen swap meet and so forth. Now, we make our way around the central exhibit walls and turn this corner—" She jogged backwards, beckoning them on.

They came to a painting in the style of Hokusai's views of Mount Fuji, done on several floor-to-ceiling panels. Jane went to the side and grasped a handle which Daria had not noticed.

"And all will become clear," Jane announced. She pulled the handle sideways, and the painted panels revealed themselves to be segments of a folding door.

"You don't have to open it all the way just to go through," Jane said, "but it's ever so much more dramatic this way."

Beyond the accordion door, there was now revealed a lounge. Two sofas, two coffee tables, chairs of the papasan and bean-bag species. Against the walls were shelves, some in wood, several built from repurposed milk crates. Daria saw, in the corner, a pinball machine, themed on the movie _Clue._

"OK, we're still giving it the old college try in some respects," Jane said. "The projector is over there if you want to watch movies or cat videos or what-have-you. Now, you'll need keys…" She darted through the dining room and into the kitchen.

"Oh, there's a kitchen too," Daria noted.

"Question?" Jane was rummaging through a drawer.

"I'm not exactly clear on the situation here," Daria admitted.

"Aha!" Jane sprinted back to Daria bearing keys and a prox card. Holding up the card: "Front door." Next, she flourished a key, with a bright orange plastic sheath on its untoothed end. "For the elevator. You'll need it to get onto this floor outside of regular business hours." Another key, tagged in black. "For the door from the gallery. And the one in green is for your room."

"My room?"

"The other live-in supervisor got married and moved out to Stoneham, so she's now a live-out supervisor. Her room's all ready for you."

Quinn was delighted. "You'll get to live in a place with its own art gallery! How cool is that? Daria, this'll be fantastic!"

Daria said, "I was expecting a… a couple rooms in a subdivided house somewhere in, I dunno, Camberville. This is… This is amazing, Jane."

Jane pushed the card and the keys into Daria's hands. "This is my home," she said. "And it's yours, too, for however long you need it."

 _—My best and oldest friend,_ Daria thought again.

"Right, then!" exclaimed Jane. "Half bath in the gallery, full bath just over there, we should work out a shower schedule I suppose, but it was fine with two or three people living here before. Your bedroom is the last down that little hall—and, Quinn, there's a guest room for you tonight. Umm, what else… If you could chip in, let's say, one hundred fifty a month for food and household sundries, does that sound reasonable?"

"That's it? For living in Boston?" inquired Daria, incredulously. "I can make that much from my blog."

Quinn said, "Or even from teaching."

Jane said, "Hey, the company owns the building, and I'm on the board. One of our original plans for this whole place was to make, you know, an artist colony. That's why we're all above the table, dual-zoned and everything. We might still carve up the third floor into apartments, but it turns out planning that kind of thing takes time. Who would have thunk? But, your place to stay, that's sorted!" She was off again, pointing at things in the kitchen. "We're pretty well equipped, helps when we have staff meetings at lunchtime. Feel free to use the technology at hand. _Mi Zojirushi es su Zojirushi._ Let's see…" She looked out a nearby window. "This part of town is kinda dead as far as places to go," she said, "but if you head up Washington towards Union Square, them's some good eats. Bars and so forth. Go through Sullivan to Broadway and there are some legit taco places. And go far enough up Broadway, you get back to your old stomping grounds, of course." Jane glanced down at Daria's feet, then blinked. "Speaking of stomping… new boots? Of the après-ski variety?"

"Um, yeah," Daria said.

"Oh, dear."

"What?" asked Daria.

Jane puffed air from the side of her mouth. "You left him with only the clothes on your back, didn't you?"

Daria deflated. _—So this is where we get into it all._ "More or less. How could you tell?"

"Daria, Daria… You _match._ New parka, new boots, even a new scarf—all from the same company. Employee discount, I'll wager—you've got the hook-up." She looked over to Quinn. "And one with an infallible color sense."

Smiling wryly, Quinn bowed her head.

"It's true," Daria said. "Right now, most of my worldly possessions were retail therapy."

"And Christmas gifts," Quinn added. "Show her the new phone that Aunt Amy got you!"

"Ooooh," went Jane, turning the device over in her hands. "Posh. I need me an aunt at Encom. Well. Let's go unload the car, then, shall we? And Daria here can tell me all about what it feels like to be stylish for once in her life."

Daria aimed a questioning look at Quinn. "You're leaving me with her tender mercies?"

"Cheerfully, sis."

* * *

Luggage in hand, Jane and Daria executed an awkward little no-you-go-first dance at the door of Daria's new bedroom. Quinn was migrating shirts into the closet. "To-o-old you," she called over her shoulder, "bringing hangars would be a good idea. You can at least start _off_ with your possessions in some semblance of decency."

The bed itself was on a wooden loft which spanned most of the room. Jane stepped around the pine-wood ladder which gave access to the loft and added the duffel bags she carried to the collection of Daria's earthly goods in the middle of the room. Apart from the luggage, the floor space was empty. Setting down her suitcase, Daria noticed a few dents in the carpet which suggested that a desk had been moved out. She saw that Jane had to duck to avoid the chains of chili-pepper lights which had been strung under the loft, and she wondered if Aisha and Giulio were both short like her.

"We'll have to see about shelves," Daria noted.

"We live above a machine shop," Jane crowed. "We can _build_ —"

Daria tipped her suitcase flat onto the floor. The contact was surprisingly loud.

"Those the kruggerrands?" Jane asked.

Kneeling, Daria unzipped the case and flipped it open.

Jane exclaimed, "You brought me bubble wrap!"

"So now you can never say I did nothing for you."

Quinn stood beside Jane and peered over Daria's shoulder. "I'm amazed you fit them all into one bag."

"These are just the ones I took with me because they'd be the hardest to replace." Daria reached into the case and withdrew one of the bubble-wrapped hardbacks from the top layer. She offered the book to Jane. "You might find this one amusing."

Jane undid the wrapping and scrunched the sheet of bubbly under her arm. " _The first six books of the Elements of Euclid,_ " she read, " _in which coloured diagrams and symbols are used instead of letters for the greater ease of learners._ Damn. People were serious about titles in those days. Oliver Byrne, 18—Jesus, 1847?" The pages were only faintly yellowed. Jane turned them carefully. "Wow. The graphics do have a certain voom to them. Kind of a Mondrian vibe, a bit of Bauhaus before its time."

"Quinn would have killed me if I had forgotten that one."

"Truer words," Quinn said, "have only seldom been spoken."

Jane closed the book, gently, and stared at its cover.

"Is something the matter?" asked Daria.

For a moment, Jane was silent. Then, "Would you two sophisticates like some tea now that we've lugged all this up here?"

The kitchen had a stretch of counter dedicated to beverage preparation, including a milk steamer and a row of spigots for different flavors of chocolate syrup.

Daria asked, "What, no samovar?"

"Should we get one?" Jane set about spooning leaves from a tin.

Soon, all three repaired to the lounge, equipped with steaming mugs of tea. Jane planted herself in a papasan chair and folded her knees up to her chest. "All right, give."

Daria had a sense of what would have to come next, but she pushed it off. "Huh?"

"You told me you'd give me the details when you got here. You're here."

"Uh."

"C'mon," Jane said. "You're the storyteller and I'm the audience. Story time!"

Daria looked from Jane to Quinn and back again. "All right." She took a deep breath. "You remember my Melody Powers stories from high school?"

"Oooh, this is a tale with a prequel. Yes, I remember."

"OK. Fast-forward from high school to the year Two Thousand Eleven. It's summertime, and I've been an adjunct professor for two semesters. I haul myself back and forth between job and boyfriend twice a week, and I spend my time on the bus blogging for _SickSadWorld._ One day, on my way out of Chicago, I realize, these things called e-readers exist, and I have enough old fiction saved up that some of it is bound to be decent. I pull out my old files, fix up the worst of the problems, and release to the world _Operation Obsidian: A Melody Glass Adventure._ "

Quinn said, "And it was a hit beyond your wildest dreams!"

"Turns out," Daria said, "I had a fan base all ready to go. Melody was just the right combination of '80s nostalgia, '90s nostalgia and `hey look a chick kicking ass' to appeal to _SickSadWorld_ readers."

Jane exclaimed, one fist in the air, "Hit all the buttons!"

Daria continued, "I got some walking-around money and some fanart… And I got an introduction to a writers' circle for self-published authors. Brett and I both started going to their meetings pretty regularly. They weren't all instant soulmates, but, you know…" Daria shrugged. "I was meeting new people."

Quinn shifted in her seat.

"Life was looking up. Brett and I stopped arguing about whether I was treading water in my job. I took the fall off from adjuncting to start my second academic book. And it was at least interesting," Daria said, "to meet people who'd made it much bigger than I had. Some of them had even gotten picked up by traditional publishers for dead-tree editions. Tell me, Jane: did you ever read _Furnace, Hammer, Chain_?"

"Tried to," Jane said. Then, a little defensively: "Hey, this was back when you could reach into the lint trap at the laundromat and pull out a copy. I got, I dunno, a few chapters in before it was `hurled aside with great force,' as you writers like to put it."

"And why, pray tell?"

"First, for starters, the sex. It was too badly written to get off on. Second, everything else. All the other stuff around the sex was creepy stalking-is-love bullshit, which then cashes in its bonus miles and upgrades to outright abuse. The heroine hates all other women. Which is fun when it plays together with the homophobia. Asking if the `hero' is gay is the worst insult _ever,_ because if a man catches The Gay, that makes him like a woman. Lesbians are sort of okay, though, because you can't get worse than being a woman already. That's the kind of _fractally wrong_ that I think I'm entitled to take _personally._ There's a being-kinky-is-a-sickness theme running through the whole thing, which is rich coming from an author who clearly has some race issues and a disturbing fascination with anorexia and an attitude about women looking childlike which one normally hears from Reddit guys coming out of the bloody ether to insist that, well, _actually,_ it's technically _ephebophilia._ Seriously! Any brain that could invent that book must need professional help, and—oh. Oh my."

Daria stared at her, face blank, gaze level.

Jane braced her fingers against her forehead. "Your. He. With. Her. He. They."

Daria said, tonelessly, "That they did."

Quinn sighed. Jane's hands made grasping and pulling motions in her bangs.

"That is just," Jane began. "I mean, that is just so completely…"

Daria told her, "I saw pictures."

"What?!"

"That's how I found out. The fan in my jalopy-top died, so I went to use Brett's computer to buy plane tickets for my Christmas visit to Lawndale. You know how web browsers autocomplete for you when you start to type in a website?"

"Oh. _Oh._ "

"The short version is that I happened to notice that certain, uh, instructional videos had been downloaded. I looked to see where they had been downloaded _to,_ and… yeah."

Jane shook her head, slowly. "What in the name of…"

"There were timestamps, too," Daria said. "It was a recurring recreational event. Pretty much the whole time I was going out of town half of every week. And with some regularity during the past fall, too."

"Shit, Daria. I'm so sorry. I guess you, you gave him what for?"

"And then I left, with, as you inferred, the clothes on my back. Plus a bag of my hard-to-replace books, the hard drive from my dead computer and a phone with a cracked screen."

"And your engagement ring," Quinn added.

"Oh, Daria," Jane said, "you can never get much for those when you pawn them."

"Which is why I left it along with my tip in the diner where Quinn found me on Thanksgiving morning."

"You did?"

"She did."

"At least the hash browns never lied to me."

Jane unfolded herself to the floor and walked to Daria. For a moment, Daria thought that she was in for a hug, but Jane crouched down before her and took her hands. Then Jane brought Daria's hands upwards and, leaning to meet them halfway, kissed each one in turn.

"I'm so, so sorry," Jane said, and for a moment Daria thought her friend was apologizing for the gush of affection. And then Jane looked up at her. "We'll make… We'll make this better," Jane said, almost in a whisper.

 _—And she is the one,_ thought Daria, _who is on the edge of tears right now?_

Carefully, Daria withdrew her right hand from Jane's hold and patted the hair atop Jane's head.

"Um," said Daria. "There there."

Jane broke into a smile. With the back of her free hand, she wiped her eyes. Then she stood and let Daria's other hand fall out of her grasp. "Wine," Jane said. "I think at this point all three of us need wine."

* * *

Jane deemed the wine selection at home insufficient for the purposes of a welcoming party, so she insisted that they go out to the "boozeohol store." This in turn required piling into the pickup truck which Jane and her colleagues used for Moonbase business. Daria squeezed into the middle seat. After a few turns, her sense of direction recognized she was in _terra incognita_ and shut down.

As she climbed out, her boot caught in the detritus which had been more or less shoved under the seat. She bent down and came up with a hat, now slightly squished.

"So that's where that went," Jane said. "First the glasses, now the hat," she added in a voice that was a little more absent and to-herself.

Daria descended to the pavement, steadying herself against the doorframe with one hand while carrying the hat in the other. "A fedora? Why, Jane, I didn't know you were in the habit of bringing home Pick-Up Artists."

Quinn interposed: "Sheesh, Daria! You of all people should be more discerning." She reached out a hand. Daria tried to toss the hat with a bit of spin. It veered to the left, but Quinn caught it and momentarily scrutinized it. "First of all, going by the brand, this is a _woman's_ hat." She sniffed, carefully, twice. "A woman who has a fondness for lavender shampoo. Second, the narrow brim with the upturn at the back and the snap-down at the front means this is a _trilby,_ not a _fedora._ Both of which, incidentally, are named for famous woman characters in the theatre." Quinn continued as they entered the liquor store. " _Fédora_ was the name of the princess in Sardou's play, a rôle written for and made iconic by Sarah Bernhardt. It was the suffragette's hat, the hat of adopted and subverted masculinity. Even setting aside the incorrect terminology for the hat itself, using _fedora_ to stand for jerkhole guys is beyond ironic—and irony is _so_ two years ago. It says, `I, Daria Morgendorffer, know nothing of sartorial expression beyond the mating habits of arrogant cishet white guys aged 18-to-30 with terribly unflattering OKCupid profiles.'"

Jane cackled. "Game, set and match to the spiffy redhead!"

Quinn popped the hat back into shape and indicated the tag on the inside band. " _If_ I recall correctly, this logo changed to a new design three autumns ago, so the item is at least that old, and it's far too upscale to have been a ten-dollar purchase at the stand next to the food court. Appropriate brim width almost always scales with shoulder breadth, so this would look _terrible_ on your average dudebro, but quite fair upon—" And she gently seated the trilby upon Daria's head.

"'You have to understand the way I am, _mein Herr,_ '" Jane sang, not exactly in any particular key.

Daria took the hat off again and tried giving it a good going-over. There was a noticeable patch of wear on a seam, about where it might get rubbed if she carried the thing by its front end using her left hand. She noticed a couple streaks of what could have been violet nail polish, slightly darker than the hatband.

_—Index finger on the outside, thumbnail making contact on the inside. Worn for some time. An expensive item, not replaced._

_—Owned by a left-handed woman of only moderate means?_

_—Whatever—now you're being silly._

* * *

The trip to get wine became an as-long-as-we-have-the-truck expedition to find Daria an office chair, and then a venture to pick up an early dinner in boxes and cartons from Good Time Fusion. They parked the chair in Daria's bedroom and unloaded the food onto the dining table.

The early night had gathered in by the time Jane was nibbling on the last of the scallion pancakes. "I remember, the first December I spent in this town. That evening when I dragged your ass to a holiday party at some halfway house for alumni that Cendrine knew about?"

"You dragged me to so many parties, they all blur together."

"But you do remember, you came down to Davis Square and we had Thai food before we caught the bus to wherever the shindig was?"

"Vaguely, I guess."

"We were standing at the bus stop, the one right by the theater, and it started to snow. Just flurries, no big deal. And I thought, I'm waiting for public transit here in the snow, in a city square full of pedestrians and people actually doing stuff and enjoying themselves, next to an indie cinema, with my belly full of Thai food. And I realized, this simple little experience was the perfect I've-gotten-out-of-Lawndale moment."

"Aww," Quinn said. "And you got to share it with the best part of Lawndale, too. I think my moment like that was seeing my first palm tree."

"What about you?" Jane scooped sriracha sauce onto the last piece of scallion pancake and shoveled it into her mouth.

Daria pondered. "I guess I felt like I was in a different place as soon as I got here. The whole environment was big-city stuff for me at the time, and I was pretty unnerved. Until the first time I felt comfortable—and Quinn is going to laugh at me for this."

"Never! Let's see, it couldn't have been at a bar, and it wasn't a sports event, I'm sure."

Jane offered, "Sorority party."

"Shopping mall," Daria confessed. "I was with some kids from my froshling orientation group—this was a few days before classes started—and we ended up wandering about the Copley mall. We were crossing the skyway that connects the Copley part with the Prudential part, and it struck me. This was a place built for the purpose of making people feel comfortable while they spent money. The very artificiality of it was soothing. It was simple, and it was purely itself, and it made sense. Even though it was too upscale to sell anything I could use. And that's where I mellowed out a bit."

Quinn said, "We'll have to make a pilgrimage to this most transformative place. And who knows? Maybe what you can get a use out of has changed."

* * *

Daria voted for assembling furniture before starting to drink. This met with a chorus of "well, you're no fun," and the night was well advanced by the time they uncorked the first bottle. Among them, they emptied that bottle over the course of three _Adventure Time_ episodes on Jane's projector TV.

Quinn, who had risen the earliest, was starting to slump into the sofa cushions. She jostled awake when Jane declared, "Bathroom break! I nominate Dariatron to pick what we watch next."

Jane wobbled as she stood.

_—Uh oh. Tell me that she is not…_

Daria was waiting for her when she emerged from the bathroom. "Two glasses of wine," Daria said softly, "and you can barely walk. The last time you couldn't drink me under the table was when…"

Jane said nothing.

Daria whispered, "Did things get bad again?"

"Come with me a sec," Jane told her. Daria followed her friend around the corner and stood at the door of Jane's bedroom.

The bed was lofted, like the one in Daria's room. Under it were a dresser, a stack of plastic storage bins and a treadmill, all of them a bit dinged and dented.

"I take these," Jane said, "to _keep_ things from getting bad." She grabbed a pill bottle from the top of her dresser and tossed it to Daria.

"Mirtazapine," Daria read. "As I recall… this hit you pretty hard."

"It's not so rough this time," Jane replied. "I just…" She took a step and wobbled into the treadmill. "Shit. I just need to stop, at, like, half a glass of shiraz, I guess."

Daria stood beside her and placed a hand on her shoulder.

"It didn't get Dark Age bad," Jane insisted. "You think I could do all I do running this place if it had?" She smiled wanly.

"I'm… I'm here for you," Daria said.

Jane pushed herself away from the treadmill and stood upright. Her arm went around Daria's shoulders, and her voice was close and quiet in Daria's ear. "That was supposed to be my line this time around," Jane whispered, a little ruefully.

"C'mon," Daria told her friend. "Before Quinn gets the wrong idea."

_—The wind down Huntington Avenue is cold._

_—It is the Sunday before Thanksgiving, 2001._

"Psssh. Hey, Dariatron—" Jane leaned over and took another brown plastic pill bottle from atop the dresser. "This is—this is a leftover from an old prescription combination. An old treatment combo. Should still be good, though."

Daria took the bottle, which rattled in her hand. "Clonazepam," she said.

"'n case you have trouble sleeping. Here, have a couple." Jane handed her another bottle, this one empty. "I've got plenty of spares to carry them in."

Daria opened the clonazepam vial and tipped its contents into her palm, where the pills formed a perfect quincunx, like dots on a die.

_—It is the summer after freshman year. I am standing in a smoke-beseiged dorm room on the freak side of Longfellow Tech. Cendrine is sorting capsules on her desk, a battered paperback of Shulgin open for easy reference._

"I have had some insomiac nights lately," Daria admitted.

"One of these ought to be plenty to mellow you out," Jane advised.

Daria transferred two pills into the spare container and returned the others to their home vial.

"Rationing yourself, eh?"

"Just being prudent. C'mon."

Quinn stirred on the couch when they returned. "Hmmm. Hi again," she said, mostly asleep.

Jane sat on the other sofa. "You know, we do have an actual bed you could use."

"Oh, Jane," Quinn said. "Such an offer to make to a respectable married woman…" And she was asleep again.

Daria let herself fall backward into the bean-bag chair. "That reminds me," she said. "Any girlfriends or boyfriends running about that I should be aware of?"

"None of mine," said Jane. "Mm. Next episode?"

_—It is spring semester, senior year at Raft. I am reading course requirements, trying to decide if I want to stay on for my master's. Jane knocks on my door. She is crying. Cendrine has been in Cali-grad-school-fornia for months now and wrote to say she met someone new, that she met another woman, and Jane is crying…_

Daria leaned forward to pick up the keyboard from the floor. Tapping the arrow keys to skip through the list of shows which the computer could provide, she said, "Tonight, on _How It's Made_ : Babby."

Jane snorted and chuckled.

"Hey," Jane said, "have you seen _The Secret Life of Machines_? It's kind of the same, but quirky and English, very English."

"You know how to find it?"

Jane reached out her arms and wiggled her fingers. "Gimme gimme." Daria passed her the keyboard.

_—She knows—_

_—She knows me plenty well enough to realize that I have enough surplus brain to be upset on two or three levels beneath what I have already said—_

_—moving into a room at Raft and finding eye-hooks driven into the drywall above the bed—"What are these for?"_

Jane moved to sit beside Daria and snuggled around her.

_—the flash of curiosity all through me—_

_—realizing I can't trust anyone that much—_

_—tagging along with friends going to that shop in Central because they needed Manic Panic—_

Jane's head was drooping onto Daria's shoulder. "Could get to like this," Jane mumbled.

_—nineteen years old and erasing my browser history with needless guilt—_

_—And now I am remembering how it felt to remember then how the pain of being pierced didn't matter, didn't matter at all because I was holding the hand of the boy I was crushing on—_

"Am I the only one still awake?"

Neither Jane nor Quinn made a reply.

And now Daria's memory at its most eidetic played back for her images of rope corsets and clover clamps and spider gags and cages, always cages; recollections of JPEGs furtively saved and then deleted; memories of trying to construct the perfect sentence to express her desires, at times out of instinct and, on other nights, to seek some kind of sense in them.

_—I see those women—_

_—"I see those women," I wrote myself, "and all I can think is, I wish I were that beautiful, so I could be exploited like that. Now and then. Consensually. By someone I love."_

The light from the projector screen played over the room.

_—That one moment of elation when it looked like the man who shared my life had an interest in the same—_

_—That one moment when all the curiosity came back so strong I could taste it and was on the cusp of being satisfied—_

Jane's weight was sinking Daria further into the chair. Getting up without waking her was beginning to seem a dubious proposition.

* * *

Daria stood in the morning air, her fists clenched in the lined pockets of her parka.

"You know, sometimes the hardest scenes to write are when a character is just putting her overnight bag in her car for her trip back home."

Quinn lowered the trunk hatch. "Oh? Why is that?"

"Because if it's _just_ about the overnight bag, then the scene shouldn't exist at all. Unless it's a spy thriller or something, I guess, and you need to establish that the papers are in the car. Otherwise, the scene has to have something else going on. Emotions. Under the surface. And emotions are scary."

Quinn embraced Daria.

"Does that help any?" she asked, squeezing Daria tight.

Daria returned the hug. "A bit."

Then, they parted.

"Drive safe," Daria admonished.

"I'll text you when I get there. And I'll visit the next chance I get. And I'll give Aunt Amy your best."

"I need to call Mom and Dad and let them know I've settled in."

"I'll back up whatever story you give them."

"Thanks. Go on, you've got a brunch to catch."

Quinn climbed into her car. "Don't be a stranger, sister mine."

"Strange, me? Never."

Quinn smiled, closed the door, buckled herself in and thumbed the ignition button.

"Finding route to home," Daria said. "Recalculating." She watched her sister drive away, and then she let herself back into the Moonbase Illyria facility with her new entry card.

Muttering, she began to compose narration. "Another city, another residence, thought Melody. There was no reason to think this one would last, that this domicile could become a home in any emotional sense, in any meaning other than the logistical. But the idea still had appeal, or perhaps only the feeling that it _should_ be attractive, that it _would_ please another woman, the woman she had stopped trying to be a long time ago…"

She stepped into the elevator and turned the gallery key.

"As the elevator carried her upward, Melody gauged the situation as though she were compiling a mission profile, as she had done for so many operations in the past. Those were her talents: planning, patience, execution. Those were the habits by which she had lived, for which she had earned praise from the only quarters that mattered to her.

"Now, they were rote exercises, with no satisfaction about them, only the bleak promise that if she kept them up, she could live long enough to continue carrying them out."

Daria stepped into the gallery and slid out of her parka.

"It had been her choice. Melody Glass… would wait."

* * *

On Monday, Daria woke late and found an e-mail from Jane waiting on her newly-handed-down Encom tablet. "G'mornin' sleepyhead," it said, "help yourself to whatever in the kitchen. I've got to get in the zone to review designs and finalize approvals and bitch out a couple deadbeat bar-stock suppliers, but I'll be up for dinner. Wuvnhugs, J."

Daria showered and changed into day clothes. She padded from her bedroom to the kitchen, did a quick scan of the fridge and tried the door to what looked like it might be a pantry. It stuck slightly but yielded to her pull, and she flicked the light switch she noticed just inside.

"Well, you're set for the winter, Mrs. Torrance," she said aloud.

Liter cans of mango pulp and boxes of ribbon pakoda and bags of chana dal must have come from an Indian grocery, as did the stacked boxes of samosas in the deep freeze. Baking staples and flats of canned goods looked like they hailed from the nearest Payday. But the number-ten cans in overbearing quantities on the lower shelves, and the frozen packaged goods marked _not for individual sale_ , and the shaft of gouda in the fridge which looked like it could club a baby mammoth—where did those come from? Unfamiliar brands, logos which had last been redesigned circa 1978—ah, there, on a ten-kilo brick of Belgian dark chocolate: _US Restaurant Supplies -- Quincy, MA -- Quantity Cookery since 1919._

She brushed her fingers over the labels on a row of restaurant-sized spice jugs. "I haven't seen this much curry powder in one place since—"

_—Digamma House. Dying days of August, 2000. Standing in the basement kitchen, suddenly very far from home, facing my first afternoon on cooking team. One of my newly acquired frasority siblings pulling a cling-wrapped metal bowl from the middle fridge. "We were going to use this lobster for a Rush event, but we made tacos instead. I guess we can cook it like chicken?"_

_—The others are sophomores and juniors, all experienced in cooking for twenty-five or thirty, all having their dish of choice already in mind. So the lobster falls to me._

_—I am standing over a titanic wok of lobster curry bisque. It is, terrifyingly, a thing like my father would make. A sophomore tests the yellow liquid. I expect her to turn ashen. But she smiles at me. "It's good!"_

_—I fail to believe her. I mentally add up the costs of ordering pizza for everyone instead. I keep doing this until we carry the three courses upstairs and call our siblings down from their rooms and suddenly people are going to the wok for seconds._

Daria counted out eight small frozen samosas and set the oven to warming. "This'll do for my lunch, but dinner should be…"

_—Deep-frying a turkey that fall for my first Boston Thanksgiving, serving it up with cornbread stuffing and sweet-potato casserole._

Yes, there was a number-ten can of sweet potatoes in the pantry. Duly noted.

_—Back in Lawndale for Christmas. The familiar buildings on the drive to Morgendorfferhaus look like faithful depictions of a story I feel I have written. My sister collides with and squeezes me at the door. "Migod, Daria, you look fantastic!"_

_—I murmur a reply._

_—"No, really! The freshman ten for you was, like, the freshman minus five."_

_—I ponder this and realize that I've trudged to and from and around campus five or six days a week, and that I've been eating better—if I want sugar tarts, I have to buy them myself._

Daria returned to the deep freeze and began to rummage.

_—My father, wanting to cook something special to celebrate my return. My mother, just out of his eyeshot, slumping her shoulders._

_—"Sure, Dad. How about we go to the store for some food parts? Just you and me."_

_—"You mean it, kiddo?"_

She carried an armful of frozen chicken thighs, plastic-sealed into icy bricks, to the kitchen counter and set them in a bowl of warm water. The oven beeped its readiness, and she slid in a baking tray with the samosas. She returned to the pantry, to check more closely what vegetables might be available. And there, just inside the door: "Is that… Diet Ultra Cola… in _blue_ flavor?!"

Daria had not seen the blue Diet Ultra Cola since she had moved away from New England. Was it only a hit with people who had killed taste buds with coffee milk? "Antifreeze for my heart," she said, and carried the 3-liter bottle into the kitchen.

_—My father and I have returned from the supermarket. I am rolling out a long sheet of aluminium foil. I delegate to my father the tasks of chopping, stirring, putting water on to boil—but not spicing, never spicing. My mother and my sister watch with puzzlement and ill-concealed concern. I call Jane and tell her and Trent to be over in forty minutes._

_—We dine on lemon-pepper baked salmon, steamed broccoli and asparagus, fettucine bechamel with a sauce I learned one week on cooking team and improved the next._

_—Quinn gobbles the food in between expressions of incredulity. My mother looks at me as if I have performed a Christmas miracle._

_—My father: "I was thinking, tomorrow we do a good old hearty tomato sauce!"_

_—"I'd be down with that," I say._

_—Jane is talking around her pasta. "You must have learned how to do tomato sauce up there—you gotta know how to feed twenty guys."_

_—"Leave the gun, take the cannoli," I reply._

_—My father makes pistols with his fingers. "Pchyew! Pchyew!"_

* * *

Jane came up the stairs and through the gallery a little after eight that evening. "Well, that was a totalllhey what smells delicious?"

Daria waited diffidently beside the dining table. She held her hands behind her back. "It didn't seem right to start without you," she said.

Between them, upon a round metal tray centered neatly on the table, a deep, newly crafted, fragrant pizza.

Daria displayed the pizza cutter she had been keeping behind her back and offered it to Jane, handle first.

Jane took it without a word and carved three radial divisions through the pie. Daria had set two places at the table. Jane pulled the nearest slice onto the waiting plate and sat before it. She rotated the plate a half turn, then lifted the slice, its apex curling down under its own weight.

She brought the point into her mouth with her tongue and took a bite. Her eyes, which had been very wide, closed, and a long, low noise of satisfaction came from deep within her.

"Marinated chicken," Daria said, "and olives and artichokes and spinach, stuffed in the crust. Topped with jalapeños and roasted garlic."

Jane swallowed and leaned back in her chair, loose and lanky. "The spinach is so we don't die?"

"You got it."

Daria popped the tab on a can of seltzer water and poured half of it into each of two glasses, which she filled the rest of the way with chocolate almond milk. She pulled a slice of pizza onto her own plate and sat down across the table from Jane. They each took a glass.

"I've missed having you around," Jane said.

"Likewise."

They clinked their glasses together.

"Till we come to bad ends," Daria said.

"Freakin' friends."


	2. Chapter 2

**Notes for the Chapter:**

>  **Content note:** Lightweight recreational drug use. Spells of melancholy. Video-game references written by a nongamer. At least one moment that is quintessential Somerville, Mass. Past Daria/Tom; past Jane/Tom; past Jodie/Mack; past Daria/a few OCs; current Tom/OC; current Trent/OC.

The rest of the week passed in a wintry mix with few distinguishing features.

On Tuesday, Daria pulled on the boots which Quinn had chosen for her and stomped through the standing snow to the Sullivan Square bus terminal. She rode the 86 bus to Union Square, which as best she could recall, she had seen only twice during her undergraduate years. It was an enduring, salt-of-the-Earth intersection, just beginning to be licked by gentrification, still too far from the subway lines to lie within a college student's mental horizons. Their junior year, Daria and Jane had joined a convoy to try a Mexican restaurant here, and now, standing under the leafless trees in the dented-triangle plaza, Daria could not remember which of the restaurants on this block it had been. She had passed through once again the year after that, riding in a friend's car back home after a party which had not gone all that well, and both she and the driver had gotten completely disoriented on Somerville streets, which turned one-way at the least convenient times and were never parallel or perpendicular when you expected them to be.

On Wednesday, Daria carried lunch down for Jane. "Figured you could use sandwiches," Daria said. Jane was at a drafting table, examining a 3D-printed part under a magnifying lamp. The part was ash gray and resembled an index finger from a gauntlet. "Grilled cheese. These ones are plain. Those have tomato, those have peppers and those have avocado."

"Aisha! Giulio!" Jane called.

And so Daria met the other two organizers of Moonbase Illyria, who descended upon the sandwich tray in short order and speedily divided the portions which Jane had not claimed. Aisha had come up with Jane from Providence, and Giulio had more or less married into the business. At the moment, they both smelled of sawdust.

"You and Jane want to chill with us some time later?" asked Giulio, starting in on his second sandwich.

"We have the co-op expansion for _Zelda Starring Zelda,_ " added Aisha, swallowing a chunk of her third. "It lets the second player play as Xena!"

Wednesday evening, Jane got Daria out of the house again, for a jaunt in the Moonbase pickup truck: a short trip up the highway to the nearest Tools 'n Things. Here, too, Daria realized she had been lost before. This must surely have been the big-box store where Digamma House ventured for construction and repair supplies. Not being mechanically minded, Daria had let others deal with buying the things needed to keep the various parts of the house from falling apart. But once, a need for PVC pipe arose in midsummer, on a day when Daria had sampled the latest from their local 'pothecary, and one "sure, I'll tag along" later, she was wandering wide-eyed up the Lighting Fixtures aisle, her vision swimming and pulsing, her body tense to the point of trembling.

_\---Damn, I was reckless then._

"You say something?" Jane rooting through plastic trays of pipe fittings.

"Oh, just… wondering if this is where they keep the Copper Female Adapters." It had been a long while since she had indulged in a live back-and-forth of "But I just met 'er" jokes, as little as they took.

Jane volleyed back: "While we're here, we should check the automotive department for a Rubber Inner Tube."

Cheap and easy wordplay. Familiar territory. "I think we can fix the one you have at home if we find a can of Tire Sealer and Inflator."

Jane chortled and Daria smiled gently, and the week slipped past. And soon enough, it was Saturday.

* * *

Daria padded out of her bedroom, scratching her ass through the thick gray fabric blend of her Forever Lazy. She crossed the den and aimed herself at the kitchen fridge, catching the clock on the stove as she passed.

_\---Twelve-forty in the afternoon? Shit. And how long was I actually out for? Five hours, maybe?_

She rummaged through the cabinet of miscellaneous drink containers, pushed past a couple shotglasses stamped with college crests, retrieved a mug and poured herself an iced coffee from the pitcher she had left to brew in the fridge in the small hours of the previous morning. With the drink clenched between her hands, she shambled back through the den and into the gallery.

Out the gallery windows, a featureless slate of sky, and the last flakes of a snowfall drifting down to mingle with the bits of secondary snow blown off the roof by an intermittent wind.

Jane had moved a new sculpture up from the workshop, a flowering metal thing, all petals and chrome. Daria drained her coffee and walked around the sculpture. One of the bits was a crisply clear magnifying mirror, and there, enshrined in the middle of a jubilant blossom:

"A hair. Growing on my nose."

Daria recalled, vaguely, that she had a Swiss Army knife in one of the pockets of her backpack, and that she might not have lost the tweezers from it. She plodded back into her room, dug through pens and a spare eyeglass case and a tube of store-brand bacitracin, and found that the tweezers were missing after all.

_\---Where did I see… Kitchen. One of the utensil drawers. Still in blister pack---Jane must have bought in a sweep of household stuff._

Tweezers in hand, she shuffled back to the sculpture.

Twisting her nose to the side with her left hand, she took the tweezers in her right and sought out the hair amid the pores. It came loose with a quick, painless pull. Staring at the quabby white dot on the formerly buried end:

"Well, Jane always was the pretty one."

She looked from the original hair to its magnified image.

"I guess I should be glad it isn't gray."

She looked over the sculpture to the window beyond and stared without focusing.

"Thirty-mumble years old," she said, "jobless except for a gig complaining on the Internet four times a month. Single. A few failures and fizzles in college and after. A void for years. Then a fella I thought would be the one who made all the hurt not matter, and he goes behind my back to play Stern CEO and Bashful Secretary. Leaving me with… The relationship I thought actually worked… doesn't even feel like it counts any longer. And I have nothing to look back on except a history of… I'm short and plain and look like a spinster librarian from Central Casting, and I can hardly remember the last time before him that I attracted anyone, and the worst part is that I _care._ For the first time in my life, I wish I could just have a… a… a goddamn one-night stand, just to convince myself it's not all over. But all I am is a withdrawn, depleted bookworm, gone past _frumpy_ into pure _frump,_ and even worse, I _care._ I can't appeal to anyone, I couldn't please anyone, which means I don't deserve anyone and I _want_ to… And I hate myself for it."

"Damn, Dariatron," Jane said, and Daria nearly dropped the tweezers.

Jane was standing in the stairwell door. _\---How deep had my funk been that I hadn't even heard her come in, dammit?_

"Sorry," Daria said. "Just, you know, thinking. Very loudly."

"Leave something for the rest of us to tear down, won't you?" There was a twitch of an attempted smile at one corner of Jane's mouth, but much more worry in her eyes. She crossed the gallery and peremptorily wrapped her arms around Daria.

"That bad, huh?" Jane whispered.

"I feel… weak," Daria said.

"Here, let's get you over to the sofa and you can sit down."

"Not weak like that, I mean…" Come to think of it, though, she did not feel all that steady on her feet. She let Jane lead her back into the den.

"Weak like you should be above all this?"

She sat Daria in the center of the sofa and took the cushion beside her.

"I thought… I mean…" Daria ran her tongue over her dry lips and tried to speak again. "I spent years at Bromwell, just working, lonely sometimes, not thinking of myself as… as all that great a catch, but not feeling like I was a horrible person on account of it. I was just being good at what I was good at. And now. And now, there's this whole side of my life, this whole side of the human experience, where I'm a… A complete fuck-up."

Jane said, softly, "You had a boyfriend go bad on you. It's not your fault."

Daria shut her eyes. "And before that? I'd feel a little more optimistic about being able to move on if I had anything other than a history of failure to look back on."

"Is that really how you see that side of your life?"

"Why shouldn't I? Big failures, little failures. Boys who stopped being into me once they got to know me. Days when it hurt, days when I didn't care. God, what I'd give now for a stretch of days when I don't care."

"I can see how that'd work," Jane said. "So… You going to try keeping yourself busy again?"

Daria snorted. "Want to see how my job search is going?" She leaned forward, snagged her Encom tablet from the coffee table and handed it to Jane.

"Well," said Jane, "you've been searching the Raft alumni site for job postings. That looks like a good beginning. And, oh look, five open tabs of fanfiction. I'd say you're making progress."

"Fantastic progress. Couldn't be better."

"What's this, _Harry Potter and the Masque of the Red Death_? One of yours?"

"I wish."

"And… Is this really _A Study in Emerald_ redone with the characters from _Sherlock_?"

"It's got a certain swing."

Jane had bought, Daria recalled, the Absolute edition of _A Study in Emerald_ when it came out: a great, thick volume, bound like a Bible, sturdy enough to brain an obnoxious ex-boyfriend. Just about the only product of the late-'80s turn to Grim, Dark and Serious comic books which held up in the present century, and one of the few stories called "steampunk" which seemed to care about the "punk." No gentlemen adventurers having their dashing escapades in Her Majesty's Royal Airship Navy---in its twisted, layering story of Holmes and Watson gone antihero to fight the Lovecraftian horrors which had subjugated humankind, the viewpoint and the sympathy were always with the preterite, with the face under the heel. Young women had been getting tattoos of Holmes and Irène Norton and Elsie Patrick for twenty years.

Jane scrolled text for a moment. "Heh. You might get a kick out of---oh, shit, is that today? Shit. Daria, I totally spaced on telling you---"

"Wha?"

"Some people are coming over this evening. We're all getting ready for a science-fiction convention in town next weekend. You know, prepping our cosplay stuff. I've got a merchant booth, and we're gonna try offloading some old movie props, and---shit. I should have given you more advance warning."

"To do what, hide in my room while there are, shudder, other people?" Daria shrugged her right shoulder. "Eh. Had to happen some time. I'll keep myself entertained in my room. What with forty more chapters of _Harry Potter and the Masque of the Red Death_ to read, and all."

"Daria, I'm so, so sorry."

_\---Jeez. I haven't had a crowd-induced panic episode in weeks and weeks._

"It's OK."

_\---And even that was understandable. I mean, I was within a fifty-meter radius of a retail establishment in the month of December. What could I have been thinking?_

"Well…" Jane took both of Daria's hands in her own. "Maybe… tomorrow we could go and do something together?"

Daria sighed and let her eyes fall shut. She waited for the tide of memory to ebb. Still years away, she asked, "What's around here for me to do?"

A new voice: "Well, you could take a tour of a chocolate factory."

Daria lurched back into the present to face a visitor from the past.

"Tom? Tom Sloane!"

_\---And so it was, true to life: coated and bescarfed against the January afternoon, pale under the wind-bite blush, an honest twinkle in one of those sea-green eyes---and sporting an Abe Lincoln beard?_

Daria swung her feet off the couch and wobbled to a standing position. Tom set down the canvas shopping bags he held in both hands and shrugged a duffel carry-all from his back to the floor. They met midway, beside the coffee table, and lightly hugged.

"Fancy seeing you here," Daria said.

"Likewise."

"Hiiiiii!" A new voice, over the _zrrr_ of a zipper and the squeak of a wet boot being unfooted, toe of one foot against the heel of the other. "Jane, I hope it's OK that we're early. Snookums here decided to drive up last night instead of this morning, and we---" The patter of socks against the gallery hardwood. "Oh, hello."

She came around the corner through the accordion door, nodding and waving to Jane, smiling in general greeting, depositing the bags she carried beside those which Tom had brought.

"Daria, this is Saavik," Tom said. "Saavik, Daria."

"Like in the better _Star Trek_ movies?" Daria asked.

_\---Dammit. You must get that a lot. Probably with comparable frequency as, exempla gratia, half-Japanese girls, do it to me every time._

"Daria… Morgendorffer?" she asked, quickly looking from Daria to Tom and back again. "I _love_ your blog!" She made widening gestures with her hands at eye level, laying out an invisible headline. "`How many years before _your_ romance dies? Love Actuarily, _next_ on _#SickSadWorld_!'" She dropped her hands to her sides, then quickly reached one up again to shake Daria's. "It's. Wow. Melody Glass is wicked. Oh, and your book---Tom bought me your book for my last birthday!"

"That explains the jubilant letter I got from my publisher," Daria said. She squeezed Saavik's hand and then released it.

Saavik wore a pinstripe vest over her blouse, a carnation in one lapel and a deeply violet silk tie knotted Full Windsor. The effect was, Daria judged, as if she had raided a museum hall devoted to a bygone era's notions of upstanding masculinity and made it all her own.

"We came over to get ready for Aletheia," she said. "Are you visiting?"

Daria felt very underdressed and very unshowered.

"She lives here now," Jane said. She waved towards Daria's room. "Can I offer you two anything?"

"Oh, right," Tom said. "Aisha and Giulio bought a house." He was peeling out of his coat and undoing his scarf.

"Let me take those for you," Daria offered.

"Oh, thanks. Um, coffee?"

"Daria made a pot of cold-brew," Jane said, beelining to the kitchen. "And a cake. And another cake. And muffins."

"Oooh," went Saavik.

Daria listened to Jane on her way to the coat-hooks. "This cake is chocolate with a hint of orange. That one is pear. And the muffins are---Daria! Are these cranberry or cran-apple?"

"Those? Pomegranate," Daria called back.

She returned to the kitchen to find Jane distributing slices of cake. "Coffee for you both?" Jane asked.

"Mind if I fix myself a hot chocolate?" Saavik shook, lightly, a prescription pill bottle. "I need to, you know, wash down."

"Sure." Jane nodded towards the row of syrup spigots. "You're the one who got us the membership, after all."

"Thanks!" Saavik chirped. While Jane poured coffees for herself and Tom, Saavik wiggled her fingers indecisively over the syrup taps. "Hmmm," she said.

"I like the chili spice one myself," Daria said. "But the plain chocolate would be the cup of a carpenter."

Saavik looked at her and smiled, skewedly.

"Daria! Coffee?" Jane asked.

"Already dosed," Daria replied. She saw that she had left her coffee mug on the counter during her tweezer-hunting expedition. She brushed past Saavik to retrieve it and heard her click the pill bottle against the countertop, muttering, "I guess mint goes with mint?"

Daria found a space for her mug in the dishwasher, decided it was crowded enough to justify activation, loaded in the detergent. "Warp factor three. Engage."

Saavik was working the milk steamer. She shot another tilted grin towards Daria.

"Gonna go stand under hot water myself for a while," Daria said, and scooped up a pomegranate muffin on her way to her room.

* * *

Her shower turned into a long one, but she felt slightly more human afterwards, and with one muffin inside her, she decided she had enough of an appetite for another. She dressed in the bathroom and rolled her Forever Lazy into a tight bundle.

When she emerged, Jane was kneeling beside the bags which the other two had brought in, rummaging through them. "Oh, this is perfect!" She started pulling out what looked to be a long coat, cochineal red. To Saavik: "This is perfect! Are you sure you're willing to give it up?"

"To see what you can work with it? Definitely," Saavik told her.

"Hey, could you find a reference to check against? The box set should be over with the DVDs."

"Sure." Saavik stepped over Tom, who was busy sorting clothes and fabrics into piles.

"Are other people coming over too?" Daria inquired.

"A few," Tom said. "We're early---I think we'd said four-thirty?"

"They'll probably be fashionably late," Jane said.

Saavik called over from the DVD shelves. "Hey, did you know you have seasons six and seven of _Columbo_ mixed in with the fantasy section?"

Daria said, "He's a cop who made his career by harassing rich white people. How much more fantasy do you need?"

All three of them laughed. Saavik said, "Oh, Lord, I've got another one on my hands."

"Another?" asked Daria.

"Bitter snarky bastard, she means," Tom said.

"It's true," said Saavik. "I can't even keep up with one of you."

Jane held the coat up by its shoulders and swirled it this way and that to examine it front and back. "Surely Daria's fame preceded her in that regard."

"Well, I don't know," Saavik replied. "Maybe just a little."

"She thinks," Tom told Daria, "my recollections are tinted by jade-colored glasses."

"Oh, speaking of glasses," Saavik said, dropping to a crouch in order to root through one of the canvas bags. "You'll need… these!" She handed Tom a spectacle case.

"Whereas Daria here," Jane pointed out, "probably hasn't heard  
_any_ Saavik stories."

"Really?" Saavik's left eyebrow shot up.

"You've found a good fellow," Daria told her, "but he doesn't write e-mails very often. All I've heard since Christmas before last has been about the green-tech auditing company."

"Which is important stuff," Tom put in. "That and managing the GSP scholarship fund and donating to the Warren campaign are how I hope to avoid swinging from a lamp-post some day."

Class lines had been a weird thing, one of the weird things, in the days when Daria and Jane had first known Tom. In high school, he had been Jane's boyfriend for a while, and then Daria's. The transition had not been among the finest moments for any of them, but they had survived it. The pairing of Tom and Daria had lasted until graduation, when it couldn't last any longer. Both of them ached and stung after that, but then came Raft for her and Bromwell for him, friendly (at first, guardedly so) notes between their .edu addresses, and it turned out that nothing in high school could have prepared them for how different life could be after high school.

_\---And that is one of life's little miracles._

Even one semester of college had meant a new environment, new people and novel confusions. _\---Come that first Christmas, Tom had been dating another Bromwell first-year for a few weeks, and I had, well, I had---_

_\---I had erred, but even that meant moving on._

Jane and Daria had crossed paths with Tom at Good Time Chinese, the twenty-third of that December, and it had been, to an extent that Daria found amazing at the time, free of awkwardness.

Over a boothful of buffet plates, Tom went from "ex-boyfriend" to "ex from back in high school," and that transition felt better than Daria had ever imagined it could.

"Well," Jane said, "there's also paying for the entertaining suite at the hotel next weekend. Don't forget that." She spread the coat out across the floor, dorsal side up. "Now," she said, rubbing her hands. "Paint."

Saavik rose. "I'll go put this in my laptop and find some good frames you can work from." She paused and turned to Daria. "So. What do you think?" The eyebrow rose again.

"Uh. Not having heard any stories, I…" Her thoughts were still ranged over their college years, the interval in which Tom had become "friend for longer than we had ever been dating each other." She blinked and refocused on the present moment. "I mean, I don't think I know anything important. You live in South Boston and commute to an office job on the Red Line, passing the long haul after JFK Station by reading library books. You've lived in the Boston area at least since you were a teenager. You and Tom have been together for not quite a year. You're left-handed and use lavender shampoo. You ta---well, that's not important."

All three of them were staring at her.

_\---Jane has that "it's happening again" expression._

"The way you pull a DVD off the shelf, the way you make hot chocolate, how you adjust the knot in your tie. Left-handed. Your nails are painted but trimmed short. Balance of probability: you spend a good deal of time typing. You wear an analogue watch on your right wrist. Also consistent with left-handedness, or just to spite Encyclopedia Brown---but you turn its face inwards. That's Tom's habit, to make it easier to surreptitiously check the time while sitting at a conference table. Maybe you picked that up for the same reason. The old coat you gave to Jane. There's a fish logo sewn onto the tote bag you brought it in---the seal of Alewife Brook College."

"Could be secondhand," Jane said.

"Possible, but less likely once you factor in the shot glasses left in our kitchen. Alewife Brook was a commuter school. I know from looking for an academic job here in town that it merged with North Cambridge Community six years ago. Assuming you attended just or shortly after high school, your family was local then."

All three of them were silent. She plunged on.

"When I put Tom's coat away, I saw yours. There was a book half-sticking out of one of the pockets. A paperback, rebound in library buckram. You had used last month's T pass for a bookmark. The ticket machines print the point of purchase on each pass. You had bought yours at Andrew Station. There's no reason to buy a monthly pass during the middle of a commute, so Andrew is where you catch the train each morning. Jane said that you were responsible for the restaurant supply membership. You work at the restaurant supply company in Quincy, and you commute there on the Red Line."

Daria stopped and drew in a breath. "And you left your hat here. I think I have it in my room." She smiled weakly.

_\---Also in that coat pocket, scrunched in with the book? Plainly for use during your commute? An old pair of earbuds, the jack end uselessly bent. If a man keeps old earbuds, he might just be disorganized or a packrat. If a woman does… You use them on the T every day, to make it appear that you are listening to music, but you're not. You don't want men trying to talk to you. But are you afraid you'll miss a sign of danger if you actually block out your surroundings?_

_\---You take spironolactone._

Daria lifted her shoulders for a deliberate moment and then let them drop again. "See? I don't know anything important." She turned to glance down at Tom. "Why don't you make up for your boyfriend here and tell me about yourself?"

* * *

_\---I am remembering, for some reason, not the events, but recounting them to Jane on the way to pizza afterwards. "I just looked at the two of them, and somehow I took everything in and knew exactly what to say. The stains on Bing's teeth, the trash in the DJ van, the wrapper for nicotine gum, the Cheeto dust on the Spatula Man's fingers. One mention of heart disease and they both just cracked."_

_\---"You got your father out of bed and jumping for joy, and you saved our school from morning DJ inanity. Promise me that you'll temper your powers with wisdom."_

_\---"I vow to use my Sherlockian talents for good. Or, more precisely, for evil."_

"You're right about the family and college and my job," Saavik said. "I'm a keyboard jockey for the restaurant supply company. I guess I'm just lucky you couldn't deduce that I was once in an _a capella_ group." She jestingly clapped a hand to her lips. "Oops!"

_\---Did she really break through to me? Am I seeing again?_

"So… How did you and Tom meet?"

At this, Jane let out a bark of laughter, and Tom, sighingly, pulled out his phone and began doing something complicated with its touchscreen.

"What?" Daria asked. "I thought that would be an innocent enough question."

"It was a party for burners," Saavik said.

"Pardon?"

"Burning Man people," Jane filled in. "Forgive Daria here. She's been living in trackless Midwestern wastes."

"I didn't think you'd ever gone to Burning Man," Daria replied.

"Me? Hell no," Jane said. "An unsustainable city of illusions thrown up in the Nevada desert? Thanks, but I've _been_ to Las Vegas, and I hated it. And _it_ had showers."

"I was there," Saavik said, "I mean, at the party, because a friend from my acting troupe was there. I'm in this group, we do live performances of classic radio plays. Like, last year, I was several terrified civilians in _War of the Worlds_ at the Somerville Theatre. But, the party. Tom knew some people because Jane knew some people---"

"I wanted to build replicas of the Mars rovers," Jane said, "so you could drive them around the playa from the comfort of your own Mission Control."

"And," Saavik continued, "some people were YouTubing, as one does. Lots of nostalgia, lots of clips transferred from VHS, you know? Then somebody switched from _MathNet_ to _Sick, Sad World._ "

"Oh, no," Daria said. _\---Surely this can't mean---_

"Somebody found---well, the video said it was a `lost episode' which never made it to DVD. There was this poor kid who claimed to've been abducted by aliens, who later came back and made him lose his job."

"Alien Love Goddesses," Daria said, and buried her face in her hands.

Saavik said, "And then Tom here looks at the artist's recreation and yells, `Holy shit, I think I dated both of them in high school.'"

"I had stepped outside," Jane said, "so I missed the fun."

Tom said, "Which meant that nobody was there to back up my story. But I had saved all my high-school stuff to my college computer, and what with one transfer and another and then cloud storage---"

He handed the phone to Daria.

It was a pretty good photo, as far as group shots went. Inside a gymnasium, with the bleachers folded up and pushed to the walls, a corral of sorts, filled with construction toys and the children and parents playing with them. Jane, Tom and Daria were crouched over an extemporaneous robot, built from clear, palm-sized plastic spheres with gears and linkages within. Daria was caught in profile, gravely attaching a miniature propeller. All about them, children scurried.

"That was a good day," Daria recalled. "Jane, you remember, just after you dumped that Nathan jerk on his ass?"

_\---And Tom and I felt like we were in a rut and needed something to do, and Mack Mackenzie suggested---_

"And I wanted to go somewhere Nathan wouldn't be seen dead," Jane said, "and Mack said that Jodie's parents were making her volunteer at the science festival at Lawndale State. Hey, are they in that photo?" Jane stepped over the piles of sorted fabric and took the phone from Daria's outstretched hand. "Neat. You can almost see Mack rescuing Jodie's sanity."

Trent Lane had taken that picture, Daria remembered now.

"Tom showed off that photo," Saavik said, "and we got to talking, and one thing led to another, as things sometimes do." She smiled at Tom, and Daria thought, _\---Oh, right. That's what people can do for each other. Contentment. Satisfaction. Happiness. Dammit._

Tom took his phone back from Jane. To Daria, he said, "Want the pictures? I can share the folder somehow with the mobile app, I think."

"Uh, sure," Daria said.

"Now then," Saavik said, rubbing her hands together, not a little gleefully. "Tom has never quite been able to explain how you and Jane ended up on _Sick, Sad World._ "

* * *

"Let me get this straight," Saavik said to Daria. " _You_ introduced Trent Lane to DJ Qiana?"

"She rented a room one summer in the uh, off-campus living group where I stayed my first two years of college."

Jane wondered aloud: "Ah, the frasority. Whatever happened to them?"

"Didn't I read," Tom began, "about a frat up at Raft which flooded when someone tried to use a sprinkler head as an attachment point for bondage play?"

"Qiana was doing her thing with live coding of electronic music," Daria barrelled on. "Trent was in town to get away from the Lane house in Lawndale."

"My other brother Wind had moved back in," Jane explained. "With his third wife. And the kid he hadn't known about from his second."

"Trent met Qiana," Daria said. "Sparks flew."

"I _believe,_ " inserted Jane, "that her _exact_ words were, `Sweet Jesus, it's Jane in a guy edition.'"

"Then," Daria continued, "in 2008 or so, they got the contract to record the new soundtracks for the _Sick, Sad World_ DVDs."

Saavik asked, "Music rights problems?"

Daria said, "That's one reason why the DVDs took so long to come out at all. Then one day, Qiana introduced me to Myron Eldridge, the producer, and he goes, `Season four! Artie and the UFOs!' I gave him a copy of my book, and he read it and offered me a paid blogging gig on their new website."

Saavik interjected, "I never saw on the website where it said you were an Alien Love Goddess, though!"

"There were crazy legal issues with that whole season," Daria said. "That episode still hasn't come out on DVD. And, to be honest, I didn't really want _that_ to be seen as the reason I got the job. Myron's a pretty cool guy. He understood."

"Yeah," Saavik said. "No reason to borrow trouble, when you're already a woman on the Internet."

* * *

"You're kidding," Daria said to Saavik. " _Super Smash Bros._ "

"Yep," Saavik replied. "I always played as Samus. And my boyfriend at the time, he was pretty much a jerk, said to me, `Heh heh! Maybe you're really a girl.' And I thought, wow, that would make a lot of things make a lot more sense. For starters, it would explain why trying to live as a gay teenage boy wasn't making me feel any better than trying to live as a straight one. I turned that corner, and---modern medicine to the rescue!"

* * *

"My parents grew up on opposite sides of 495," said Saavik. "He called fizzy sweet drinks `sodas,' and she called them `tonics.' And yet they're together to this day!"

Tom pondered this. "I guess on a scale from one to Montagues versus Capulets, that's pretty survivable."

"See, now _that's_ a thing which bothers me," Saavik exclaimed. "Everybody gets that wrong, I guess because none of the movies do it right. The feud between Romeo and Juliet's families is _dying._ It's old news. Everyone would be happy enough if they found a decent excuse to end it while saving face."

Jane was skeptical. "Really?"

"Read the play! The only person on either side who takes it seriously is Tybalt. The heads of the families are all," and here Saavik closed her eyes and tapped the index finger of a splayed hand against her temple, "`Tis not hard, I think, for men so old as we to keep the peace.' Sure, there are some ruffians in the ranks, but they're petty brawlers who'd have themselves a riot if you passed them a football."

"Or," Daria said, "as they call it in Europe, `a soccer.'"

Saavik pressed on. "That's why Juliet has to be so young, so she can idolize her cousin Tybalt and soak up all his stories, without any maturity getting in the way. You know what her father says about Romeo, at the party? He says `Verona brags of him to be a virtuous and well-governed youth.' And he's supposed to be talking about the only son of his sworn enemy? Pull the other one!"

"For that matter," Daria said, "when Romeo's friends want to go to the party, and he says they shouldn't, his reason is that he had a bad dream about it. Hence the whole Queen Mab speech from Mercutio. But you know what Romeo doesn't say?"

Jane suggested, "`When motherfuckers go to the wrong party, that's when motherfuckers get shot'?"

Saavik yelped: "Exactly! He's not concerned about a fight to the death, only that Rosaline will be there."

"Rosaline," Daria added, "is a Capulet, and none of Romeo's friends say that it's a problem."

"So," Tom said, "MTV lied to us."

Saavik replied, "That's what makes it a tragedy. Everything _could_ have worked out fine, with the feud ending in a great big happy wedding. But no, all the wrong people were dunderheadedly romantic at the wrong times."

Daria commented, "Looking at you, Lorenzo."

"And it ends in misery instead."

"This reminds me," Tom said, turning to Daria, "didn't you once completely fluster your English teacher by insisting that Hamlet was neither mad nor indecisive?"

"Mr. O'Neill was easily flustered," Daria responded.

"Like ohmigod!" Saavik jumped in. "I have _so_ had that fight. I mean, isn't it obvious that Hamlet can't just go and kill Claudius? He needs _proof_ that Claudius bumped off his father. Nobody else even heard the Ghost say so, and they don't know it's really his father's spirit. Hamlet out and out says that. He wants to be made King, not get drawn and quartered for murdering Claudius. He doesn't really screw up until he misses the chance to stab Claudius after the mini-play, and that's because he thinks Claudius is praying, and he wants to make sure the man is damned on top of being dead---"

Saavik broke off and looked around the room.

Daria stepped into the gap. "The way I see it, Hamlet and Claudius should be played like L and Light in _Death Note._ Their soliloquies and asides are internal monologues where they try to outthink each other."

Saavik clapped in delight. "And the Ghost is the Shinigami!"

Tom and Jane caught each other's eyes. "Are we ready for this?" she asked.

He sighed. "As long as they both didn't have to memorize the  
_Canterbury Tales_ or something."

Saavik began, "`Whan that Aprille with his shores soote…'"

"`The drooth of March hath perced to the roote,'" Daria continued.

"Enough!" Jane yelled.

* * *

Other people began to filter in. Some brought clothes, and some brought beer. Daria soon lost track of their names. There was a David and a Diana and a Liam, along with others besides. Jane introduced her to a Morgan, a young genderqueer fire-spinner with floppy indigo hair. Saavik came by to explain the varieties of cake and muffin available in the kitchen, and she told Daria that Morgan was the only member of her old trans support group who she still kept in touch with.

"The only one?"

"Watch out for her," Morgan said. Ze smiled, a little crookedly. "Daria here is a writer, and writers are always gathering new research material. You get to know that gleam when they make smalltalk."

"I'll be careful," Saavik assured zir, faintly wryly.

"Look, a distraction," Daria said, pointing at the pomegranate muffins.

Chuckling, Morgan turned to Saavik and asked, "Are you going to be in the radio play this year?"

"Eh, sadly, no," Saavik said, launching into a story of overlapping time commitments that Daria lacked the context to follow.

Tom found her a few minutes later, leaning against a milk-crate DVD shelf. "You OK?" he asked.

"Lots of people," Daria said. "I may have to make good on my threat of hiding in my room and reading. I just… didn't have time to psych myself up for an actual _event._ "

"This'll probably go on until all hours," Tom predicted. "It's not the most coordinated of planning meetings."

"I'll be fine."

"If you'd rather take a break from them all, you could crash at my place instead."

"Your place?"

"I rent an apartment over in Back Bay country for when I'm in town," he said. "I could drive you over there. You could lay low until tomorrow, have some peace and quiet. Then maybe tomorrow we could catch up, without the madding crowd?"

"Peace _and_ quiet, you say? But surely you have stuff you need to do here, with the things and all."

"Not so much that I can't take a break."

Daria considered. "Fine. Let me find my toothbrush and things."

Saavik and Tom exchanged a quick peck at the elevator doors. Then she clasped Daria's hand. " _Hamlet with Shinigami,_ " she said. "It has potential."

* * *

Tom's car looked to be the first hybrid ever driven off the assembly line. _\---All these years under the bridge,_ she thought, _and he still drives a rust buggy---just an environmentally aware one, now._

"Were all these dents the result of trying to park in Boston?"

"The dents are from up and down the I-95 corridor," he said. "That missing paint on your door is from dropping Jane off one night in the North End."

"Oh."

Tom guided the car into the Sullivan Square rotary. "A new life awaits us in the Off-World Colonies!" he declared, taking in the concrete expanse with a wave of his arm.

"If you expect an empathy response from me," Daria said, "that transport jumped into hyperspace a long time ago."

Tom just grinned.

He drove Daria south, across the river, and then west along the curve of it, weaving through taxis as the early nightfall closed upon the city. He took one turn and another and another, and suddenly the Public Garden was going past on their left, posh brownstones on their right, the trees potted everywhere all gingercaked with snow.

"I never really got to this part of town," Daria said. "Except, I think, there's a bookstore on Boylston or Newbury. And another one in the Pru, and one… uh, I guess I tried all of them in between Raft and BFAC at least once."

"Borders imploded a while ago. You missed the descent of the vultures for their clearance sale."

"Oh, I was a vulture too, when they cleared out of Evanston. Bought myself a stack of manga and two spinny book-rack things. Those stayed with… um…"

"Ah." They were stopped at a light. "The indie place with the café is still here. Books by the Ton, too."

"Lot of New Age stuff at the indie place. I liked their pancakes, though."

"Tell you what," Tom said as the car hummed into forward motion again. "Tomorrow morning, we go out for brunch. And pick up a how-to guide for getting your chakras rotated while we're at it."

"I _did_ let my quantum crystals go 3,000 miles without a tune-up."

Tom parked the car with the unfazed confidence of someone who had endured the ordeal many times before, and who had a resident parking permit to back up his decisions. "Welcome," Tom said, opening the passenger door for her. "To Boston's answer to Madison Avenue, and the home of the 66-dollar cheesecake!"

"Not quite my speed," Daria said.

"Perhaps a stroll down Commonwealth Avenue, Boston's attempt to answer the Champs-Elysées? You could pay your respects to the statue of William Lloyd Garrison."

"They have such a thing?" Daria asked. "Maybe later. How about… dinner?"

They ordered carry-out at a Japanese noodle place around the corner from Tom's apartment.

"No, this is on me," he insisted. "It's time for my soaking."

"Well, we broke-ass academics have nothing to lose but our girlish waistlines. So, fine."

Daria was thankful for the Quinn's Choice winter boots she wore, as she plodded through the standing slush on the sidewalk. The wind picked up and she shivered. "Supposed to get cold again tonight. And all of this will freeze solid."

"There's that Morgendorffer optimism!" Tom said. "Remind me to get online and check into zamboni rentals."

Daria shot dagger-eyes at him.

"What? Oh," he added, remembering. "The thing with the thing never to be spoken of again."

He held the door open for her, the bag of carry-out in his other hand, and then he led her up the stairs.

His "Boston place" was not large: a nook of a dining room, an excessively poofy sofa facing a TV on the wall, a kitchen somewhere between cozy and cramped, and behind a bead curtain doorways to bedroom and bath.

"Silverware! Music! Drinks!" Tom exclaimed, setting the food on the table and sallying forth into the kitchen.

"Only the best in awkward-pause-filling technology," Daria said.

"What was that?" he asked, his head in the refrigerator. "Something about filling the inevitable awkward silences born of our tortured pasts?"

"Something like that."

 _\---He looks good,_ Daria thought as they removed dinner from the sack and sorted it across the table. _\---Growing up gave him… some character. Definition. Around the eyes. Those sea-green eyes. They look better for having seen._

She gave herself an inward shake. _\---Yes, he looks good. She lucked out._

They listened to Wendy Carlos' _Switched-On Brandenburgs_ while they ate.

"You know," he said, "You could come to the convention with us next weekend. Write it down for _#SickSadWorld_. And Jane would love the amoral support in the artists' hall."

"Oh, Tom, I haven't a thing to wear."

"Given the route some people go with cosplay, that might be exactly… well, isn't covering this kind of thing your beat?"

"My beat," she sighed, "is Ninja Turtle movies. Oh, and the perennial struggle between Aliens and Predator."

"Xenomorphs versus Ninja Turtles," he said. "I'd watch that."

"It would still be better than _Prometheus._ "

He laughed, and she smiled.

"Maybe I'll go," she said, surprising herself.

"Really?"

"Well, if we can find a schoolgirl uniform which fits me, and a giant plush squid."

"Kind of last-minute, but Jane does have resources at her disposal."

She smiled again.

They finished their noodle soups without speaking. Daria looked about the apartment. A game console, a few generations behind the bleeding edge, was plugged into the TV. On the floor beside it were a few jewel cases for game discs. _Cannibal Frag Fest 3000,_ a compilation of one hundred one arcade classics, and a billiards simulator which looked like it had been packaged with the console.

 _\---How do you play billiards,_ she wondered, _with a cue the size and shape of a VCR remote?_

 _\---Tom and pool,_ she thought. A memory arose unbidden.

"Something funny?" he asked.

"Oh, it's just… you remember the time Jane and I visited you on spring break?"

"Spring break? At Bromwell? Freshman year?"

"Yeah. We drove down from Boston, and---"

"And crashed at my dorm, yes."

"And for some reason which rhymes twice with `Cain,' we got kicked out of that frat party, and we ended up in the basement of the student center, which was almost deserted on account of the vacation and all."

"And I was talking with… some upperclassmen from my go club, and you and Jane were playing pool on the ratty-ass table there… ah!"

"Playing badly, very badly, yes."

"I was going off about…"

His Christmas-new TiVo, which he had pulled apart and souped up with a redundant hard-drive array, a sizzling-fast WiFi interface, a flux capacitor and dilithium-crystal regenerator and so forth and so on. "Why," he had said, "it makes my nipples hard just thinking about it."

Just in time for the last sentence, Daria had walked into earshot, pool cue over her shoulder. "Is he talking about his TiVo again?"

They broke into giggles over the memory.

"And when… and when…" Tom collected himself. "You guys had left back to Boston, the older boys on my hall were like, `Dude, this is the first time a freshman has brought his own babes.'"

"I remember that," Daria said. "You e-mailed me about it."

"Really?"

"Mm-hmm. And I wrote back---"

The recollection struck Tom, and they said in unison, "Jane is a `babes'?!"

And they tumbled down into giggles again.

"Oh God, oh God, I had forgotten all about that," Tom said. "How do you remember an e-mail from, Jesus, from 2001? And with all of them you wrote back then!"

"Two hundred sixteen pages in the first year," Daria said. "I gathered them all into a book to… to keep them from getting lost."

"Do you still have it?"

"The file must be on my computer somewhere. I think my print copy… ended up with Jane's stuff. Maybe it's at her place. She might have mis… It was Cendrine who printed it up nice."

"Oh."

 _\---That crazy sentimental idea was how I met Cendrine in the first place,_ thought Daria. _\---Thanks to the first nonawkward conversation in months I'd had with… yeah. And so I met Cendrine, and so she came to my birthday party that fall, and so she met Jane and so and so. Down into the great attractor of emotional shit I can't handle._

"Earth to Daria?"

She tried to pull herself back into the conversation.

"Uh, just wait until they send you up here, Major Tom."

She sighed.

"Look, Tom, I… I've been through… altogether too much, and it's all still pretty fresh, and I never know what will lead me down the wormhole into memories I'd rather not live through. But because I never know in advance whether a given trigger will send me into a funk or for how long, and so much of it is associations other people don't know about and could hardly follow if they did…"

She trailed off. He waited.

"Just don't blame yourself if something you say seems to poke a hole in me, OK?"

He nodded.

"I've been in a place like that, too," he said, serious. "Jane and I will be here for you, however long it takes."

"And… and Saavik?"

Tom smiled and looked down. "I'm pretty sure you made a good first impression. And she's had… her share of troubles. Grounds for empathy will not be a problem."

"Do you think she and I could be friends?"

"Wow! The years _have_ changed you."

"To-o-om…"

"I hope you can. Really and truly."

His unguarded sincerity made Daria smile slightly, then bite her lip, look down at her interlaced fingertips, then look up to catch his glance again. "OK… OK then."

The music filled their silence for a little while.

"Dessert?" she asked.

Tom sprang into action and scuttled to the refrigerator. Looking into the freezer, he said, "I've always wanted to say this---but we really do have purple stuff, Sunny D---"

"Come again?"

"Saavik must have left a bottle in here to see what it would turn into."

"And the purple stuff?"

A pint of black raspberry ice cream from Emack & Bolio's. They spooned it into a pair of coffee mugs and returned to the dining table.

"Was it the summer after that when you came back to Lawndale and we all got stoned in that field they were digging up to put in the new strip mall?"

"Must have been. With the giant concrete pipe things, and---"

_\---Me crouching inside a concrete tube, Jane popping out of another singing the Super Mario theme, then leaning over the mouth of my artificial cave and being all "just like old times again?"_

"And the Caterpillar equipment for tearing up the field, and---"

_\---Jodie Landon of all people climbing up into one of the damn machines and a great diesel rumble and Jodie calling down---_

"Guys, I don't know how to turn it off!" Tom and Daria laughed.

_\---Then five of us squeezing into my car for what turned out to be a low-speed getaway, back to Casa Lane where we probably smelled less of pot than everything else present, and Jodie fell asleep in Jane's lap…_

"That took me for a loop," Tom said. "Daria Morgendorffer, baked as a pie."

"Caution: Contents Lukewarm."

_\---That was the fourth time for me. The first, the summer before. The second, the first Friday of term, 4:20. The third, the…_

Mercifully, Tom's voice overrode her thoughts. "Was it the summer after that when we went to the Books by the Ton they put in there and moved all the copies of _Naked Lunch_ into the high school summer reading section?"

"No, we did that at a different store, when… No, you're right, because Lindy was the café manager there, and I remember I never met her while you and I were dating."

"That _does_ sound like one of our dates, now you mention it."

"Well, it was… it was Lawndale. What was there to do?"

"Point." Tom paused momentarily in thought. "Hell, I think my third or fourth date with Jane was her coming over to my house to use our scanner on her portfolio."

Daria stirred her ice cream about in the coffee mug. "God, it's like… multiple layers of the past… annual floods of Lethe, or something."

"In what way?"

"Well, they buried all those concrete pipes, whatever they were for, right? So that's that anchor of memory gone. And I never went back to that mall after the next summer, because my parents moved to the other side of town."

"That's right---that did happen about then, didn't it? After your mother finally made partner to fill that abruptly vacated spot."

"That took me off my feet, when Dad called. `Hey, kiddo, guess what? Mom's promoted, I'm retiring and we're moving. That's right! No need to be near a school now, with you and Quinn making your own way out in the great big world.' `But Dad, all the good times we had in that house? Like, uh…' `When I set it on fire?'"

"Word on the country-club circuit was that Schrecter popped that blood vessel while he was on the phone with your mother."

"Law of averages. He was overdue for a serious health problem, what with that credenza drawer full of uppers and all."

"You're kidding---that story is true?"

"Everyone at the firm knew."

"Wow." The ice-cream mugs were empty. "Want to play a dungeon level of _Cannibal Frag Fest 3K_?"

"No, I'm… not really up for serious social commentary tonight. And you should get back to the costume party." She rose and gathered the remains of her dinner. "There's a young woman waiting there who wants to work on your cape with you."

"My… oh. Thanks."

They migrated the remains of dinner into the kitchen and disposed of what couldn't be saved.

Tom added, "You sure you'll be OK staying by yourself tonight?"

Daria nodded. "Since everything went down last November, I've been with Quinn, with Quinn and Stacy, with Quinn and my aunt and my _parents,_ with Jane… I'm ready for a little alone time." She paused. "But I'm holding you to that brunch promise."

Tom grinned. "Hug?"

"Definitely."

They held each other, not tightly, but with relaxed familiarity.

"You hang in there," Tom said, quietly.

"Mmm."

They pulled apart.

"I'll text you when I'm up and around," Daria said.

"Two p.m.?"

"Is my name Lane?"

"I hear even Trent keeps better hours these days."

"The mind recoils at the image."

"Take care, Daria. Help yourself to whatever you need around the apartment."

"Thank you. See you tomorrow. And… backup hug?"

They held each other a second time, and then Daria let go. They told each other "Tomorrow" once more, and then Tom waved from the stairs.

And Daria was alone.

 _\---This will be,_ she told herself, _the longest solid stretch of undiluted Daria-time since Quinn found me in Ilium._

"And I haven't a clue what to do with myself."

She paced from the kitchen to the sofa and back.

"Is there a problem with that?"

She packed to the sofa and plopped herself down into it.

"Damn it. You really fell into the memory fugue pit, didn't you? Damn it. And you're going to make your best friends walk on eggshells until the unspecified future date when you somehow get better? Bad plan."

She closed her eyes and pushed up her glasses to rub her lowered eyelids.

"Admit it."

She opened her eyes and stared dully at the inert TV.

"Admit it."

Her gaze dropped.

"You should have nailed him."

She inhaled, slowly, and exhaled, puffing out her cheeks.

"You should have jumped his damn bones thirteen years ago. You should have deflowered yourself upon him. You would have been a terrible lay. A no good, horrible, very bad piece of teenage gloom cookie. You would have sucked, or rather, failed to suck with any dexterity." She sighed. "And he would have accepted it. He would have explained in his Reasonable Voice that nobody is great their first time. And you would have gotten better. A bit. Maybe. And you could have gone off to Raft with a bit of experience and understanding instead of an insecurity you were too intellectual to admit and a perfect psychological setup for disaster. A long, slow-burning disaster."

She crumpled forward and buried her face in her hands.

"It would have been nice to make _somebody_ happy by wanting them. Ever."

She felt for a while like she might cry, but the bleakness kept tears from flowing. She sat, no longer speaking, waiting to be able to stand and move again.

A while later, her phone rang.

"Jane?"

"Yo! Saavik says she has a black pleated skirt---sorry, _skort!_ \---which you can borrow, and we can scrounge up a blouse, hit the Garment District for a blazer---"

"Jane, what are you on about?"

"I don't quite know how we'll handle the squid, but I'm sure we can improvise---"

Daria felt her face turn red.

"Jane---"

"This writer knows the plural of octopussy, _next_ on _#SickSadWorld_!"

* * *

Daria stood at the door of Tom's bedroom.

"No," she said aloud. "That would be… well, he did say I could help myself."

She pushed the door slowly open with her right index finger.

A dresser, with one drawer not slid all the way closed. A nightstand, its top drawer likewise. Two paperbacks and a crumpled soda can atop it. A bookshelf running the length of the wall. Two other books atop the quilt at the foot of the neatly-made bed.

" _Inherent Vice_ and _The Deeper Meaning of Liff,_ " she said. "Well, if I just want to veg out…" She extended her arm, then let it fall back. "Maybe TV would work better."

Tom had a dinged-up laptop plugged into the TV set. Its screen showed the playlist they had listened to over dinner. Daria looked over the three remote controls from different manufacturers, chose the one whose brand matched the TV set and pushed the power button. The flatscreen glowed into life, showing the same still image as the background wallpaper of the laptop screen. She was willing to bet the image was a Jane Lane: a team-up of superheroes posing in the ruins of a city, their faces obscured by floating fruit. Futzing with the computer trackpad, Daria quickly realized that she could drag windows from the laptop monitor to the TV and back again.

"Okaaaay… I suppose I could call and ask how to get the TV to show anything else, but then Jane would just belittle the value of two degrees from Raft and a doctorate from Bromwell. Hmmm…"

The laptop was also running a movie-player program. Daria found its list of recently-viewed files. Tom and whoever else had lately been over had watched three episodes of _Serial Experiments Lain_ and after that _Evangelion 2.22._

Daria shrugged. "Good and twisted enough for me." She set _Evangelion_ to playing, dragged the window over to the TV monitor, hit the key to fullscreen the video and wandered into the kitchen.

Anime hadn't really been a thing when she was younger, she reflected, sipping a glass of cranberry juice. Back in Lawndale of dubious and questionable memory, she and Jane had rented _Venus Wars_ and _Project A-Ko_ from the good old Lackluster, but apart from a few such VHS tapes, the medium hadn't really been represented.

 _\---The night before room-selection meeting at Digamma House,_ she thought, as the movie mayhem kicked in. _\---How did they explain it? Choosing rooms at 6:00 in the morning cut down on combativeness. Best to do such things late… or early._ Some houselings had set an early alarm, but she chose to pull the all-nighter option in the common room, joining the others who found it easier to stay up until morning. That was the night she encountered _Urusei Yatsura_ and _Bubblegum Crisis_ and _Neon Genesis Evangelion._ Six or seven episodes in, her head was glassy and her thoughts fogged and the dawn breaking.

"I didn't think it could be done," she said as the credits rolled. "That was more disturbing than the original show."

She checked the time on her phone. (No texts. No missed calls.) It was still early enough to take a walk, maybe explore the neighborhood, snark inwardly over Back Bay fashion victims… but in the cold and the slush?

"Why not make an early night of it?" she asked herself.

Unzipped her backback, withdrew the brown plastic bottle. Two pills rattled within as she lightly shook it.

"Early evening," she said.

She carried her pack into the bathroom, dropped it by the door, rooted through it for loose sleeping clothes and turned on the bathtub taps.

"Looks like I get my rose petals and candlelight from Big Pharma tonight." Standing at the sink, she swallowed the pills with a cupped handful of cold tap water. She left her day clothes on the floor and her glasses atop her flannel sleepwear beside the sink.

"Damn it," she said later, watching the bubbly water lap just below her kneecaps. "This really works." She chuckled softly, then more loudly. Her glasses were too far away, and the world was too blurry to bother with. She let her hands trail back and forth near her shoulders, feeling the waves of warm bubble-bath which their motion created, waves passing over her chest and reflecting off her folded legs.

"You're mellowing, Morgendorffer," she told herself.

It had been a long time since she'd tried a drug, she realized. Too long? Dalliances with frivolous diversions, set aside as childish things? Or enriching experiences, some of them, pushed back and away as she'd tried to follow a path which by now was pretty plainly not working?

"I'm not sure," she had told the woman.

Caitlin, one of Quinn's friends from that waitressing job, a student at Lawndale State. Holding a ceramic pipe and a Bic lighter in the fingers of one hand, offering them to Daria while her other hand held a bag of marshmallows ready to be immolated by the snapping and popping campfire in the forested hills outside the Lawndale where high school had just recently become part of the blessed past.

"Not your thing? That's cool."

"I just don't know if I should do anything which would help me relate to my parents."

They had all laughed, Caitlin and Quinn and Jane and Tiffany (whom she'd never met before---but there was always bound to be a Tiffany).

"Daria, you're a riot."

Daria had smiled and almost blushed, and then had taken the pipe with its packed bowl after all.

"I tried to gather more firewood," she recalled, splashing herself with abrupt flicks of her fingers. "But every time I reached down for a stick, it turned out not to be there." Remembering how strange it had felt, as if the machinery her brain normally used for filling in gaps and shadows had thrown its gears.

Jane had found her, grunting and humpfing, a dead tree trunk as thick as her neck over her shoulder. "Damn it, this one's not getting away!"

"I was stoned out of my gourd," she said to herself, naked in Tom Sloane's bathtub. "Hmm. I appear to be stoned out of my gourd right now. Not being able to stop smirking would probably have been a good clue."

Her fingertips had begun to prune.

"That was fun," she admitted. "And the first time at college wasn't bad, either. Nor was the time after that, if I'm honest with myself. I mean, getting my head skritched felt pretty nice. It was the dumb decisions I made after I sobered up which hurt. And when the weirder stuff was around, like the time Trent and the band came up to play Longfellow Tech…"

She pulled herself out of the bathtub, eventually, and redressed in her loose flannels.

"Mm-hmm-mmm. I wish I could hug someone while I felt like this. Must find a willing victim somehow…"

She slept that night more peacefully than she had in months.


	3. Chapter 3

**Notes for the Chapter:**

>  **Content note:** Reminiscences of depression and family strife.

_Daria's Journal, Inaugurating a Brand New, Posh Hardback Notebook. Tuesday, 15 January 2013._

_I braved the slush yesterday and made my way to a stationery store up near Raft. Treated myself to a fistful of disposable fountain pens. I hadn't known that such things were a thing. Between these, my history of failed relationships and my coffee intake, I must be a Real Writer._

_The convention—that is, the fifteenth annual Aletheia—is to kick off this Friday. Jane has Plans for my attendance. I refuse to let this frighten me._

_Tom explained the logistics to me. "I never really learned how to spend money for fun," he admitted. "So, I set aside all that I didn't spend on indulging myself last year, and now we're having a party. More specifically, three parties: Friday night is the chill session with movies and board games and a little karaoke for close-ish friends. Saturday night is the big bash for everybody and their plus-ones and plus-twos and the new folks that the plus-twos met at the convention."_

_"Sounds jolly," said this reporter._

_"No obligation," Tom said. "And we recover the next night with the most laid-back event of them all. We four have the run of the place. No pressures, nothing to do but kick back and let someone else do the cooking."_

_Saavik was slurping the filling out of a cupcake. At this, she paused. "Dude, that has a downside."_

_Weird stuff to think about, after all these years. The Sloanes were old money—Colonial New England, in fact, so their money was about as old as money could get in Anglophone America. That caused plenty of friction when Tom and I were an item. But it wasn't until much later that I realized it had an upside, too. College brought the opportunity to mix with the nouveau riche, and that provided a—what's the polite phrase?—"study in contrasts." The Sloanes had a gobsmacking amount of liquid assets to spend, but their choices of what to spend it on were not wholly determined by the price tags of the purchaseable items. They were stuffy and irritatingly hidebound by traditions, but those traditions did at least include getting a first-class education and even something of a commitment to public service. While their philanthropic efforts did skew towards museums and symphonies—generally, to causes that meant opportunities to be seen in black tie—they did at least make the goddamn effort. And, after meeting the sort of teenagers who would these days be the Rich Kids of Instagram, well, I have to admit, Tom's upbringing wasn't all bad._

_Grace, Sloane and Page had been one of the most staid financial firms on the East Coast. The culture at the top was too fundamentally stodgy to be interested in radical new ways of slicing, dicing and repackaging debt. Deregulation left them almost unmoved. So, when the crash came, as Tom remarked, they were too dull to fail._

_That, at least, was the story generally shared. Embarking on my PhD studies at Bromwell, Little Daria heard much more. Tom's father Angier had wanted to modernize, to move into the new territories opened up when regulations were stripped away. Tom opposed the idea. What started as a statistics question, a technical critique of the SEC's conclusion that repealing the uptick rule was a fine and safe move, became a family quarrel when Tom took his concerns to Messers Grace and Page. Angier Sloane felt that his son was slinking behind his back. Tom acccused his father of betraying the ideals he had espoused, in the name of short-term profit._

_The bad blood was still unresolved when the doctors found the cancer in Angier's thymus._

_Damn, fountain pens are good for this sort of thing._

_I suppose I ought to make a habit of recording the memories when they bubble up on me—to get them out of my head, to take away a little of their power over me, etc. Sometimes they have the odd texture of disuse. Disconnected fragments, separated out by virtue of having occurred in a place that I never revisited._

_Jane, back in Lawndale after her first semester at BFAC. Living at her family home again. Working for someone whose daughter had told him about the Jackson Pollock murals that Jane had done across the gymnasium walls for a Lawndale High dance. A defunct appliance store in a strip mall, converted to an indoor playground._

_Little Daria, having such a mature soul for her years, had found a job in Cambridge and so spent only a little time in Lawndale that summer. Trent told me that Jane was decorating the back rooms of the playground place, the rooms intended to be rented for birthday parties. They were unfriendly, windowless chambers, unsuited for the purpose. I brought Jane a family-sized box of chicken tenders and cheese fries. Jane wolfed into them, getting barbecue and honey-mustard sauces all over her fingers._

_The mural was replete with rocketships and dragons and princesses packing laser guns._

_I gave Jane a lift home. We talked of nothing in particular. Then, without warning, at the front door of Casa Lane, she pulled Little Daria close and wrapped me up in a hug that had more than a little desperation about it._

_"Back rooms without windows," Jane said. "A box for screaming children of indifferent parents on a run-down street in a dead town. Tell me that's not it. Tell me that's not where we end up."_

_In our years together, Jane had been at times angry and resentful and confused, but this was a sinister emotion, a sadness that infected what it touched and made the expressive, passionate Jane Lane into a blank shadow. It would pass that night, and it would return later._

_But, eventually, she won. She fought it every day for months, and now, the dark interval that seemed to last forever is itself years in the past, and she's running a goddamn company._

_Tom won out, too. He's even in love._

_And Little Daria? Whatever happened to her?_

_Hey, fuck you. I've got fountain pens._

* * *

"This arrived for you," Jane told her, carrying a cardboard box. "And not a day too soon!"

"I don't think I ordered that much Thai green curry."

Jane deposited the box on the kitchen counter, unfolded a wicked-looking multitool and began to attack the packaging. As the tape came undone, Daria read the address label. "From Aunt Amy?"

"I'll admit, she consulted me on this, so we get to share in the glory."

"Or the blame."

Jane reached into the box and extracted an envelope, which she handed to Daria.

"`To my favorite niece,'" she read aloud. "`I remembered you got a lot of mileage out of the pair you inherited from me, and that they gave their lives in the line of duty at that Longfellow Tech incident. Wouldn't you know, the shop where I bought them is still open?'"

Jane held aloft a black boot in each hand.

"`If you don't go off and join an all-girl punk band like I did, I hope you'll still find a use for footwear made for stompin'. Love, Aunt Amy. PS: Now that you have a Bromwell diploma, are these Post-Docs?'"

"I feel like I'm in the presence of history here," Jane said. "And hey, you never told me that your trademark boots had been your aunt's!"

"I am a woman of many secrets, Fraulein Lane."

"Me too," replied Jane. "Bravo Romeo Bravo." Raising an index finger in a just-a-moment gesture, she left the kitchen and headed for the bedrooms.

She returned with a stack of folded clothes. "Phase one," she instructed Daria, "get changed. Boots too. I suggest putting them on after the pants."

"Again with the matching," Daria monotoned.

In her bedroom, she commenced changing into the new clothes. The black jeans were crisp and sturdy. They fit her waist and had the right length, but were a little tight on her thighs. A broad belt of brown leather fell out of the charcoal-gray sweater when she unfolded it. The right sleeve had been cut and hemmed, so that it came just over her elbow. With the belt and sweater in place, she examined the jacket. "Black, with white trim? Is she trying to make me into Number Six?" There was a steel clasp on the high collar. "No, not quite."

A knock on the door. "You decent?"

"Come in." Daria sat in her chair and began to pull on her glossy fresh Docs.

"Phase one is a success," Jane declared. She was carrying another box. "Now, stand up, and hold your right arm out."

"Umm…"

"I know, usually women have to buy me dinner before I say that. Chop chop."

"Implications of amputation do not generally inspire confi…dence?"

A glove? No, a gauntlet? The shell of a replacement forearm? It looked to be made of metal, but the way Jane carried it made it seem too light for that.

"This was going to be _my_ Aletheia costume," Jane told her, "but I think it'll work even better on you. Oh, better lace those Martens first."

Daria complied. "People will talk. They'll think I'm actually getting into the spirit of this thing."

"Just hang with us. We'll have spirit to spare."

"Does that mean you'll be going as a bartender or a Ghostbuster?"

A minute later, her boots were laced, and she stood. Jane came to her right side and slid the prosthetic over her arm. It came up to her elbow, and Jane adjusted the sleeve to conceal the skin left uncovered.

"Good fit?" Jane inquired.

"Uh, yeah. It's… light." Daria flexed her fingers. The loss of dexterity was no worse than with a regular winter glove, she figured. Perhaps actually better.

Jane watched critically. She inserted a screwdriver into the wrist portion. "Let's try tightening it here, just a bit. OK?" Daria nodded, and Jane applied a couple turns to each of two small screws. "How's that?"

Daria moved her appendage about. "Nice. Actually."

"Good. Next, pocketwatch." From her box of goodies, she withdrew a large silver timepiece on a steel chain. The watch cover was imprinted with an insignia, a heraldic emblem—a rampant manticore. Jane clipped the loose end of the chain to a belt loop at Daria's right hip.

Daria flipped open the watch. The works inside were real, and ticking. On the inner surface of the cover was incised, in rough letters, **18 Nov 01** , and on a line below that, **Never Forget**.

_—The wind down Huntington is cold, too cold for the thin fabric on my legs, and Jane is flipping a bus schedule over in her hands—_

"Beautiful," Jane proclaimed, a satisfied smile warming her angular features. Daria was trying to think of something to say when her friend continued, "Now, your coat!"

It had been the long red overcoat which Saavik had donated to the cause. The back surface now bore a serifed cross along the vertebral line, with a snake looping about its arms.

Jane helped Daria into the black jacket. Daria fastened the clasp at her neck—it was easy enough to work even with her new arm. She took the red overcoat from Jane and pulled it on. Then she spun on her boot-heel. It seemed the right thing to do. Her coattails turned after her.

Jane bubbled with delight. "Oh, God, this will be just too perfect. Too!" Gently, she took Daria's bare hand and slipped a white glove over it.

Daria stepped back and clapped her hands together, forcefully, in an insolent subversion of a prayer. Then a Mona Lisa expression stole over her face. "Thank you."

"My pleasure."

She followed Jane out of the bedroom.

A medly of beeps and whoops came from the pinball machine in the lounge. Tom and Saavik were trying to play it in tandem, one flipper-control each. They looked over as Daria strode up, and the ball rattled, unseen, off the board.

"It works," Tom said. "It certainly does."

Saavik just goggled.

* * *

Daria tossed her tablet aside with a sigh. The device landed on the sofa cushion. Its screen dimmed and then, untroubled by a user's touch, went dark. She walked from the lounge to the kitchen and decided to stare at the beverage equipment counter for a while.

Several hours before, she had tapped into a lode of fanfiction, an obscure collection only available through the Internet Archive's Wayback Machine. Most of it was zine material written during the first couple seasons of _Star Trek TNG,_ circulating on Usenet and BBSes for a while, eventually being cached on a GIF-happy website in the mid-Nineties. In a lot of it, Tasha Yar was alive. There was a high density of _Dirty Pair_ and _Space Battleship Yamato_ references, which at first she put down to the enthusiasm of the fanfic writers, but which turned out to derive from in-jokes apparently buried in _TNG_ itself. Wesley Crusher was variously scarred by delta rays, glorped by brain slugs and revealed as Captain Picard's son. Perhaps because the fans had only bothered to save the fraction of the stories that they had cared about, the average quality level was surprisingly high. Daria had looked up at the conclusion of a novella in which Wesley turned out not to be Picard's son after all—subverting a genre convention she had no inkling about until that night—and discovered that the time now verged upon five in the morning.

"Onward to the saga where the Iconian gateways change everything," Daria asked herself, "or take drugs so I can sleep?"

Alethia was to start that afternoon. She had her costume now—Edward Elric, the Fullmetal Alchemist—and with it, the concomitant sense of obligation. Backing out, after Jane had gone to all this trouble? Unthinkable, dammit.

She splashed milk into a glass and returned to the lounge. As she sat down again, she jostled the computer's wireless mouse, which had somehow migrated into the couch cushions, and the projector glowed into activity. She moved to shut it off again—this was not the hour to watch TV and start a racket—and saw that, on account of their having watched an English technology documentary, the computer was now suggesting that she view James Burke's _Connections._

The layers of memory unspooled quickly. In one, she was ten, and her mother was away somewhere on business, and she was stumbling sleepless out of bed around midnight to find her father up and the TV on. "Oh, hi kiddo. This used to come on back when your Mom and I had that apartment before you were born!"

In another layer, Daria was seventeen, remembering that night as she and Jane walked out of Anthony DeMartino's history class. Only it wasn't Mr. DeMartino's that day or for a while after, because Mr. DeMartino was enjoying a soft room and free toast at a secluded retreat far from Lawndale High's star QB, Kevin Thompson. The substitute had plugged a tape in the VCR and gone to take a nap. "And I stay awake," Jane complained. "It's against the natural order, I tell you."

"Short visits to one topic after another," Daria mused, "interspersed with dad jokes. I wonder why that seems so familiar."

Later that day, Quinn and the Fashion Club had passed them in the hall.

"And that _suit!_ I just can't get over it!"

"Just when we thought brains couldn't commit any _worse_ crimes against fashion."

"It, like, offends our refined sensibilities or what-ever."

"Maaaybe Quinn's cousin has a suit like thaaaat…"


	4. Chapter 4

**Notes for the Chapter:**

>  **PREVIOUSLY, ON _DARIA_ :** Thirteen years or so after high school, Our Heroine is a washed-up academic with a series of advanced degrees, failed relationships and irregularly successful writing efforts behind her. She left her cheating boyfriend and moved back to Boston, to live with her friend Jane Lane. Jane, now running an art shop specializing in custom movie and TV props, introduced her to a social circle featuring both old and new faces. Soon, friendship got the better of caution, and Daria found herself agreeing to cosplay Edward Elric at a science-fiction and fantasy convention.
> 
>  **Content note:** A character recalls experiences with Pick-Up "Artistry" and blithe cissexism.

The party thrummed and pulsed and mingled with itself. It wound around furniture and up steps. It carried drinks outward from the bar, where Tom watched over the grand central room of the suite, shaking cocktail mixers and spinning bottles with his white-gloved hands. His jacket-over-tunic ensemble gave the appearance of a military uniform, worn by a man with open contempt for his nominal superiors. He took a moment now and then to slide his shades back up the bridge of his nose, so that their oval lenses caught and toyed with the light.

Daria caught sight of Morgan the fire-spinner, currently in heavy makeup as a Borg drone. Ze gave Daria a nod and saluted rather solemnly with an umbrella drink. This prompted the woman with whom Morgan was speaking—a lanky figure dressed as a brown teddy bear—to turn about with an inquiring glance. Jane waved happily and beckoned Daria to join them.

This, Daria was only too happy to do, but it required working her way through a substantial amount of the crowd. A grandiose gesture from a young man she passed nearly connected with the side of her head. He looked over and then made apologetic noises, adding, "Wicked outfit!"

"Thanks," Daria said. "Excuse me, I have to go meet its maker."

Every third or fourth person at the party was, Daria estimated, in cosplay to some extent. This was representative of Aletheia on the whole, judging by what she had seen over the past two days.

At last, she stood beside Jane, who hooked an arm around hers and leaned in close. "Told you it would be a hit!" A lock of Jane's hair flopped forward. A crosscross band just above eyebrow level kept the lock constrained in a bundle.

"You win the bet," Daria said. "Do you want quatloos or woolongs?"

* * *

Tom poured lemon-lime soda up to the halfway point of her cup, then added a stiff measure of cranberry juice and topped it off with orange and a splash of pineapple. "You look like you're trying to find the signal in the noise."

Daria took the cup from his hands. "Thanks. Trying to read body language, and all I get are signs that people slept with each other."

_—Is it a good thing or a bad thing that I don't get attracted to people until emotions get involved?_

"In this crowd? Yeah, the social network is pretty much a hairball."

"One great big fun drama vortex," Daria said.

"Is that a happy face or a sad face?"

"It's just, you know…"

Jane appeared beside her and leaned against the bar. "Like high school all over again? Hey," directing this to Tom, "you have fixings for a Shirley Temple?"

Tom began assembling her drink.

"Worse," Daria said. "In high school, I could tell myself I was above it all. Now, it's like there's something I need at the bottom of the vortex, and I want to throw myself in."

_—Not that anyone would care to pick me up._

"If you're serious," Jane said, "I can point out people."

"Uh."

"Too soon?" Tom asked.

Jane waved her hands placatingly, then took her drink and slurped a mouthful of it. "Too soon," she said. Then, brightening, "So a man walks into a talent agent's office—"

_—And I couldn't reciprocate anyone's interest unless and until I gave them a piece of my heart, dammit._

Daria interposed: "Where's Saavik?"

"Oh," Tom said, "she texted me a few minutes ago. Said she'd met some people she knew down in the dance hall and she'd try to get them all up here."

"More people," Daria said. "Same number of escape routes."

Tom propped himself up against the bar. "You doing OK?"

"As long as I keep telling myself I'm here to do research, yes."

Tom's jacket pocket began to play "Karma Police." He read the caller ID and held the phone to his ear. "Dial-A-Sloane." Holding it in place with his shoulder, carrying on with the construction of a Gibson. "Uh-huh. That's from Morris himself? Yeah, well, Valley boys, what can you do? `We're innovators who are all about disruption! You can tell by how we all look alike!' No, but—all right. No, I think the stats we've got will cover it." He looked down to scan the dial of his watch. "Hmm. I'm with you on that. Tell you what: you and Tink put what you've got up in the cloud, and I'll see what I can do with it." He handed off the cocktail glass and continued, "Jess, if we don't sort it out now, I'll just have it in my head to stress over, and the night will be ruined anyway. Gimme half an hour and we'll see what I can come up with. OK. Talk to you soon."

He gestured to Jane. "Can you keep an eye on things for half an hour? Work calls." This last while waving his phone a little apologetically.

"Sure. Just don't expect those cocktail olives to be waiting for you when you return."

"Super," Tom replied, and with a generally harried air he squeezed his way between the party-goers until he vanished around the corner that led to the master bedroom.

And then Jane was busy attempting to mix a Manhattan with orange bitters following instructions on her phone. Daria felt herself recede into the background.

_—I should strike up a conversation._

She finished the last of the concoction that Tom had made for her.

_—I should join the genial chatter in which Jane is partaking right now. It will be easy and enjoyable._

Daria swung her feet a few times. Then she slid off the barstool and made her way, unhurriedly, to the door.

* * *

"Melody knew she had to file an after-action report. She knew she had to force her unease into the open, to codify and catalogue it. Otherwise, her discomfort would linger and fester. And that was bad for Company business."

Daria was mumbling to herself, gnawing on the blunt end of a pen as she sat, alone, at a round table for six. The snack buffet, in the basement room beside the hawkers' hall, was quiet at this hour. She turned the pages of her notebook until she found the place where her rough-draft statement of academic interests had trailed off. Then she drew a horizontal line, inscribed the date and sought within herself for the right character's voice to recount the convention so far.

* * *

_The convention began in an encouraging enough way. There I was, patiently queueing for the registration desk, looking out from the mezzanine over the hotel lobby. Taking everything in, telling myself it's all fine, I'm here to gather material. Then, at the desk, sliding my photo ID across the Formica:_

_"Daria Morgendorffer, multipass."_

_Equipped with my badge, I rejoined Tom and Saavik. The latter was sashaying a little, singing in a melty tenor, "`Who's been casting devious stares in my direction?'"_

_Tom's reply, plaintive: "It's not my fault I got drunk and downloaded all those songs from high school!"_

_We saw Jane waving from across the lobby. The room fairly seethed with activity, most of it aimless. As we navigated through it, I tracked the coffee cups in the hands of people coming from one direction, the shopping bags carried by those going in another. I counted two Klingon warriors, the Tenth and Eleventh Doctors, a genderflipped Captain America, a trio of Imperial Stormtroopers, a Faye Valentine (how was she not freezing?), Finn and Fiona and a tall woman in a dark wool overcoat and a deerstalker hat with captions attached to it by wires._

_Saavik looked about. "Hey, where'd Jane get to?"_

_My phone buzzed. I pulled it out and read the incoming text: "Look behind you."_

_This time, her flying hug-tackle lifted me from my feet._

_I looked her up and down. "I get it. Serial Experiments Lane."_

_"Come on," she said. "Let's get the three of you looking fa-aaabulous!"_

_On the elevator ride upwards, she explained the merchandise they were hoping to unload. Downstairs, in their booth in the hawkers' hall, they had unpacked a crate of paintings that had been MacGuffins in a miniseries about a gentleman thief and forger. Imitations of forgeries, which made the whole show more artful than it deserved to be._

_When I stepped into the entertaining suite, I quailed. I knew then how accustomed I had become, after serving my time as a grad student and an adjunct professor, to modest and respectable spending._

_Tom asked, "What do you think?"_

_"Surprisingly tasteful," I said._

_Jane, flouncing onto a chaise: "Yeah, I had expected much more of a `walking into a SkyMall catalogue' vibe."_

_Tom and Saavik vanished into one of the bedrooms to change. I had worn much of my Fullmetal Alchemist outfit as my street clothes, just swapping my boots and pulling my parka on over the sweater. I was flexing the fingers of my prosthetic, testing my ability to unwrap a chocolate bar, when they emerged from the bedroom._

_"Commander Ikari," I greeted Tom._

_"Bet you were wondering why the beard," Jane said._

_Saavik stepped out from behind Tom. She wore a snappy khaki jacket with a matching skirt that came to her knees. A short, feathery indigo wig framed her face, and a matte-gray collar curved around her neck, open at the front, with cable jacks and plugs at the two terminii flanking her throat. A leather Sam Browne belt cinched in the jacket at her waist and ran over her right shoulder. She slid a glove over her right hand, a spiffy little item that left her fingertips bare, but added some intimidating metal over her knuckles._

_"Hey," she said to me, "I think we're technically the same rank!"_

_I glanced at the three rows of modest insignia just over her breast pocket. "You're more decorated than I."_

_It was roughly at this point that Morgan entered, pulling a luggage trolley laden with booze, the magnetic pull of which had ensnared several other people whom I vaguely recognized from the preparation party._

_"Hey, there's a karaoke machine in here!" Jane held up a microphone on a long cable._

_Still adjusting the USB collar for a comfortable fit, Saavik darted to the cabinet and jabbed the power button. She pushed keys on the machine's control panel to speed-scroll through its list of artists. In a moment, her face lit up._

_Jane looked from the younger woman to the display panel and back again. Saavik beckoned her in to hear a whisper, and whatever she heard made her smile and surrender the microphone._

_I glanced away momentarily to watch Morgan don the Borg eyepiece that ze had made the weekend before. I looked back as Saavik said, her voice now amplified through the room's sound system, "This one goes out to a young woman who just moved here from Chicago. It's a song about cultural appropriation. Daria, others present, I think it's time we blow this scene. Get everybody and their stuff together. Three, two, one… **Rawhide!** "_

_She had a fine singing voice, one that gave the impression of great power under tight control. Soon, she had the room joining in on the "head 'em up"s and "ride 'em out"s. I noticed that she left the gender unchanged in the "wishin' my gal was by my side."_

_Not long after, Jane returned to the hawkers' hall, and the rest of us went exploring._

_We found the discothéque, which was trapped in Remix the Eighties mode. Next door were the subdivided function rooms, the sort rented for topical sessions of real-estate broker cabals. Tonight, the room we entered was set aside for a LARPing event of some sort. The people I was with knew people already there, and some sort of conversation appeared unavoidable._

_There were signals of undercurrents: the way Morgan's fingers adjusted zir Borg-drone monocle, the low wattage of the smiles with which both ze and Saavik greeted certain shifts in the general chatter. More than a few interactions in the room read as the cool politeness granted an ex from a relationship concluded but not yet completely resolved. However, who the pairings might have been was hard to tell. The signal, if it was there, had been obscured by the scheduled conviviality, the sense of this-time-comes-but-once-a-year. But beneath that, one felt the substratum of friends on the opposite sides of a breakup, perhaps repeated with different alignments two or three times._

_Thankfully, dinnertime interrupted._

_Jane/Lain reunited with us as we left the hotel. We rode the subterranean electric bus to South Station and walked to Chinatown. A dozen people squeezed into a renowned hole-in-the-wall, next to a bakery, a juice bar, a curio shop and a pornogerie. A dozen people, of whom I knew two well and another two vaguely._

_And here I had one of those moments, one of those little interludes where you think, "This is totally a prototype or an archetype or a microcosm for something or other." When life surprises you with a concrete realization of a theme you had mostly contemplated indistinctly in the abstract._

_It began with the ordering of the pan-fried Peking ravioli. First, the judgment had to be made as to how many our table could collectively consume. Hands, or rather index fingers, went up all around. Some fingers were straight, the others bent. It transpired that a bent finger meant the diner wished only half a regular order. Abashed, I dropped the hand I had raised and made some kind of "never mind" gesture before turning my attention to emptying my teacup._

_In the eyes of everyone I did not already know, I was an outsider, and a gauche one at that. While the food was chosen and awaited and eaten, Tom and Saavik tried a few times to bring me into the conversation. "Daria, didn't you once write something for **#SickSadWorld** about that?" I made an honest attempt to rise to their leads, but the chill never quite lifted._

_How odd it felt to be me, of all people, a writer for **#SickSadWorld** even, and to feel myself out of place at a science-fiction convention. I, who in my day had been a Love Goddess from beyond the stars._

_During the midst of these thoughts, I found that Jane/Lain had snuck three pan-fried Peking ravioli onto my plate._

_We returned to the convention hotel to see a play, a spoof of several decades worth of science-fiction tropes, put on by a group with which the Major sometimes performs, though circumstances I didn't know the details of had kept her from participating in this show. It was a fine show, too, one which demanded the scenery be well-chewed by story's end. I laughed, frequently, and the merriment was general._

_"It was good," Saavik said, "but it's just not the same without the captain's faithful sidekick Lumpy." Agreement was widespread on this point._

_The next day, Jane was scheduled to staff the Moonbase booth all through business hours. I tried taking in some panels. There was a session of filking, spoiled by poor organization which left too many people in the room not knowing the tunes of the songs for which the comedic new lyrics had been written, thereby trampling the chances of a real sing-along. Together, Saavik and I sat in on a session about an abortive attempt to make a **Doctor Who** animated movie after the show was canceled in the 1980s. Roger Ebert had just given his thumbs up to **Akira,** and both the possibilities and the affordability of animation were intoxicating. René Laloux, fresh from his fantasy epic **Gandahar,** was ready to direct. A script was drafted, apparently with at least some input from Douglas Adams. Animation tests were made, voices recorded over concept art… and the whole thing went up the spout._

_The session was surprisingly poorly attended. Me, I'd have thought that Sylvester McCoy regenerating into Diana Rigg would have drawn a bigger audience, but perhaps the description in the programme gave away too little. Word is, the people running the panel will be Kickstarting a documentary about the lost Doctor, so stay tuned._

_Strangely enough, the only Doctors I saw around the hotel were all New Who—except for the gentleman dressed in a blazer, jeans and a long scarf, limping on a cane adorned with flame decals. His pocket of pill bottles must have been bigger on the inside._

_"Would you like a jelly baby? By which I mean Vicodin."_

_We lunched with the Moonbase Illyria team in the hawkers' hall. Over my empty chili bowl, I looked over the programme once more._

_"`Why does a science-fiction convention have such a strong fetish contingent?'"_

_Tom asked, "Well, why shouldn't it?"_

_"No, that's the name of a session, in room 2A."_

* * *

"Daria?" A young woman's voice brought Daria out of her notebook.

"Saavik? What are you doing down here?"

"Oh, you know, just—" Whatever she had planned to say faded out. She shifted her weight and ran her fingers up underneath the blue-purple bangs of her wig. "Can I sit with you a minute?"

"Sure."

Saavik pulled out a chair opposite the round table from Daria and crumpled into it.

Daria asked, "Rough night?"

Saavik snorted. "Not my best."

"You didn't come all the way down here from the party?"

"Never made it that far. Hell, you want to hear the story?"

"Um, sure."

"I was down here, over in the dance hall. I meant to go up to Tom's party, but it was a pretty good set, and I lost track of time, and then I kind of got swept along with some people I sort of knew who were going to another room party. And the guys I knew from college had to talk with the people they knew before they could leave, the way that happens."

Saavik drew in a ragged breath and went on. "I got cornered by this guy. He was pleasant enough at first. That's how they always are, right, you know? Pleasant enough at first. I was just waiting around, killing time, doing the smalltalk thing, and he starts going on about something involving medicine."

"Portraying himself as an eligible young doctor?"

"He said he had majored in alternative medicine in college. I was trying to be polite, because, you know, party, and I thought it might make a scene if I said anything. Like, for example, the reason they call it `alternative' is because if it worked, it would just be `medicine.' Then he said something about Western doctors being all closed-minded and `out of tune with our bodies' natural healing energy,' I think was how he put it. Which just, I don't know, sat wrong with me, can't fucking imagine why."

"So then you left?"

"Well, I kind of looked around and took a second to think, and I realized he had been doing that trick where you lead a girl to different parts of a room so she feels like she's been talking with you for longer. It's, like, some Pick-Up manual thing? Only it didn't work, because I'd been counting the seconds until I could get out of there and up to Tom's party. I should have left right then, dammit, but before I could decide how polite my exit should be, my college friends came over, and I thought we'd be on our way. But they got to talking with Mr. Healing Vibes, and one of them said something about me transitioning. And then it was all `I Didn't Know You Were _A Trans_ : Conversation Number Three.'"

Saavik slumped over the table and rested her head on her right arm, while her left hand wandered out to toy listlessly with a candy wrapper someone had discarded on the table.

"It's just, so, I don't know, _insidious._ You spend year after year feeling like your body is wrong in a fundamental way. And you kind of internalize that. Like it's a basic rule of who you are. So when you finally present in a new way, when you're read more and more as the gender which feels right, there's this little voice in your head. `You should be grateful,' it says. `You should thank the man for calling you a pretty girl. That's the validation you wanted. You can't pass it up, can you?'"

Daria couldn't think of anything to say. She waited in silence until Saavik pushed herself up and leaned back to stare at the ceiling. "Like I said, not my best night. Even before we got to the `So, how does sex work with you?' part."

"What did you do?"

"I reached into my pocket like my cell phone had just vibrated, and I pretended that my boyfriend had just texted me. Because I am just that _fucking subtle._ Then I threw my drink in the trash and walked out." She paused, as a thought occurred to her. "On my way out, I heard Harry—one of my _acquaintances_ from college—inviting everybody to his Super Bowl party. And everyone was being, I dunno, pumped about it? I got this quick taste of something that didn't compute. Daria, why are people so _proud_ of watching the Super Bowl? Like, contrarian proud?"

"Same reason they come out as bold supporters of Valentine's Day. A milder form of asking why there's no Straight Pride parade or White History Month. They like the self-righteous thrill of being an oppressed minority, without the actual risk."

"Huh." Saavik blinked a few times.

Daria felt a pulse of what might have been grim satisfaction, although the satisfaction part was a little lacking. Her default response to distraught people was to try drawing them out and diverting their attention, sending their thoughts down a different path. For a wonder, here was a person and a situation where that actually appeared to work, to an extent at least.

Daria asked, "You want to head up to Tom's suite? I'm sure the party is still going on."

"No. I don't think so. I mean, I feel—kind of a mess."

"If you'd rather sit in the dark and not have to talk or think, I bet there's a movie or an anime marathon somewhere in this place."

"You want to join me?"

"Sure." Daria pulled out her phone and checked the Aletheia schedule. "Looks like they're showing _The Andromeda Strain_ in about fifteen minutes."

"What's that about? Is that the one with the germ from outer space?"

"From back before we discovered the greatest threat to space exploration was American indifference."

"I'm in. God, am I in."

* * *

They emerged into the empty hallway which linked the conference rooms with the elevator alcove beside the lobby. Faint noises came out of the anime-screening room just across from them. 

"I liked it," Saavik said, sounding surprised at herself.

"Goes to show," Daria said, "they can't play the genuinely _bad_ movies at this hour, because con people _want_ to see them."

"It's like, there's a…" Saavik slipped the knuckleduster glove back onto her hand. "An appeal, you know, to seeing people at the top of their profession doing what they do best? Competence on display?"

"Yeah," Daria said. "It's the opposite of gawking at a disaster and saying `You had one job! One job!'"

"Right! They _have_ one job, and they're trained by the best to do it, and they do the right thing—"

"Even in the face of blood-clotting bugs from space, and even more horrifying, an original story by Michael Crichton. Something wrong?"

Saavik was looking down at her toes, walking with swinging kick-steps that advanced her slowly for the amount of motion involved. "Thanks for staying with me," she said.

"I'm not much of a support system," Daria said. "In fact, that I have anything to give after all I've taken seems rather implausible."

"Psssh." Saavik looked around the corner, past the elevators, toward the hotel lobby. "Hey, look! It's a perfect bit of Beige Land!"

"Hrmmm?"

"You know, the interchangeable places. The anodyne territories. Made to look and work the same no matter how far from home you are. They function on their own logic. Catch them after closing time, and they're empty of the people which are their reason for existing. They aren't even haunted. The shoeshine stand in Terminal C. The beige places."

— _Been dwelling on this, turning it over in her head more than once._

"A vending machine," Daria suggested, "beside the bathroom in a Student Union, the night after Christmas, advertising Ultra Cola to a bulletin board open to notices from clubs which haven't met in nine months and never had more than five members when they did."

"Damn, girlfriend, where have _you_ been lurking?" Saavik looked over to the stairwell which led down to the basement, with the hawkers' hall and the room set aside for the disco. "Oh hey, we're not alone."

Even at this hour, a couple con people were idling on the stairs. The woman tapped her high-heel black boot against the top step as she spoke. She wore a black skirt with a considerable tendency to swirl, and a corset the color of a slightly dusty pumpkin. Over one arm, she carried a grayish raincoat. The man, sprawling like a spiky-haired Diogenes in a leather jacket, took up the other side of the stairs.

"Not the mask," he said. "The masks are for tossers."

Daria could not hear what the woman said in reply, but the man's voice cut across the lobby, the voice of a public-school dropout trying to sound as tough as possible as he deferred adulthood in the orbit of London.

"The man was a bloody _theocrat,_ " he said. "And these pimply colonial wankers have turned him into some potted spunk fantasy. `Like, dude, anarchy in the UK, bro!' I need that like I need a zit on my foreskin. You know what their _anarchy_ means? Each mask, ten quid in the till for Wanker Brothers, that's what. The pause that refreshes in the corridors of power!"

The woman's reply was a little louder than before. "Do me a favor?"

"Yeh?"

"Next, say, `I'm off to Tesco. Fancy a fry-up?'"

"Sod off."

All through this exchange, disquiet had been welling up inside Daria. It began with the feeling that those two reminded her of something from a long time ago. Then came the memory of what in her past that was, then the sensation that the match was too exact to be funny any longer.

Daria took a step closer to them. Saavik looked at her with a concern which Daria barely registered. Then Saavik looked back to the other two, and Daria took another half-step, and the woman turned to face them.

The regulated air of the hotel lobby was now the outdoor air of a clear autumn afternoon, smelling of fresh apples and dried leaves and the unwrapping of chocolates.

"Hello, Daria. It's been a long time."

There was no hint in her tone of an accidental encounter, no suggestion this meeting was due to serendipity.

Daria's voice was not quite as raspy as she expected for herself. "Hal… Halloween?"

The man rose from his sprawl, and the two of them strode the few paces to where Daria stood.

"The very same," she said to Daria.

The last time Daria had seen this woman, the woman named Halloween, she had looked eighteen, old for eighteen, seasoned by a life a few degrees less secure than Daria's own. She had worn much the same clothes. She had played drums in a band with Trent Lane.

And she had most decidedly not been real.

"And you remember our lead singer, of course."

"Bonfire Night," he introduced himself to Saavik. He offered a hand.

"Saavik Yan," she said, grasping it briefly.

Halloween lightly touched Bonfire Night's elbow and whispered, "I think Daria's friend is a little on edge. How about some girl time?"

Bonfire Night nodded. "Right," he said. "I think I'll go see about that fry-up." He turned with a wave, took a step back toward the stairs, and disappeared.

Halloween clucked her tongue. "Honestly, that man."

She clasped her hands, wrung them just a little, interwove her fingers. "Well, Daria, and Saavik…"

Both of whom were standing without moving.

"Daria?" Saavik asked. "What's happening?"

"I met them… once…"

"Fifteen years, has it been?" Halloween smiled, a little _this-isn't-easy-for-me-either_ smile. Perhaps she was eighteen, perhaps twenty.

"That was a dream," Daria said. "A long, rambling dream that came in pieces when I was doped up after they pulled out my wisdom teeth."

"Yes," Halloween said. "You were full of Demerol and trying to explain to your father how Christmas, Halloween and some English punk had fled Holiday Island to start a band, and you had to get them back where they belonged. Which we do appreciate, by the way. Both us and the personage in charge of the boundaries."

"The… boundaries?" Daria echoed back in a whisper.

"Of the waking world," Halloween replied. "There was a certain confusion in those days, a kind of fallout from things gone majorly whack a few years before. We were walking the Earth, me and my friends, thanks to some `advice' that Christmas got from… well, never mind who exactly. Point is, you got us back home, which spoiled the plans of a particularly nasty, well, not _person_ exactly…" She clasped her hands again. "Long story short, I'm here to introduce you to someone who'd like to make a deal with you."

Daria sought in herself for words. Saavik spoke first. "The same someone who's in charge of… of the boundaries?"

Halloween nodded. "The Lord Shaper. The Oneiromancer. The Emerald over Terminus. Youngest and third-eldest of the seven Endless. He who rose to the aspect of King of All Night's Dreaming." Halloween paused for a deep breath. "Daria Morgendorffer, the Sandman would like a moment of your time."


	5. Chapter 5

**Notes for the Chapter:**

>  **PREVIOUSLY, ON _DARIA_ :** Our Heroine has a new friend, Saavik, a clerk and aspiring actor who entered Daria's life by way of being Tom Sloane's girlfriend. They're up late together at a science-fiction convention (cosplaying as Edward Elric and Motoko Kusanagi respectively). After a movie in the small hours of the morning, they encounter a woman from Daria's past, a character that Daria believed she had never really met in the first place. And the visitor is here to tell Daria about a certain proposal....
> 
>  **Content note:** One character gets a glimpse of another character's fantasy that's a touch TMI.

"Perhaps we'd better discuss this outside," Halloween said.

"Outside?" asked Daria. "In the snow?"

"Doesn't look like snow," Saavik said, crossing the lobby to the revolving door and pushing her way through.

Daria followed. The wind that met her as she emerged was as gentle as she expected it to be cutting. She reached out her gloved hands and gathered a few of the… "Cherry blossoms?" They caught in Saavik's wig and melted to water, like snowflakes, on her face.

 

Halloween came through the door, skirt swirling, raincoat hooked by one finger at her left shoulder.

"I didn't think you were the springtime sort," Daria said.

Halloween's lips quirked. "Oh, this is bigger than just me. It concerns us all."

"All…" Daria cleared her throat and tried again. "All of Holiday Island?"

"The Holiday Island which you remember," Halloween began, "is a skerry of the Dreaming. The present matter concerns not just that little outpost, but all the Dreaming, not to mention realms beyond. Shall we walk and talk?" She stepped out into the deserted traffic loop and headed for the street.

Daria muttered, "Angels and ministers of grace defend us," and followed.

"Sometimes they do," Halloween said, spinning her coat from her shoulder and slipping her arms through its sleeves. Without turning around, she added, "But most often not."

The street was empty. Saavik caught up with them as they turned left, heading, Daria figured vaguely, across the channel and back towards South Station and downtown. Except that this didn't seem to be the road they had taken to the hotel, two afternoons before. It did not seem, in fact, like the middle of Boston at all. To their right, across the street, where there should have been a concrete plaza and an entrance to the subterranean bus line, there was instead a marina, fronted by a row of clapboard shops, like a small Atlantic beach resort. The skyline of the city in front of them was… too tall, with too many layers and too many lights moving midair between the highest skyscrapers.

Daria took Saavik's hand. It seemed a sensible thing to do. Their fingers, gloved and bare, interlaced. "You're taking this well," Daria said.

Cherry blossoms fell around and between them. "You remember," Saavik said, "I told you I was in _War of the Worlds_?" She tilted her head upwards and began to recite: "`Starting now, we couldn't soap all your windows and steal all your garden gates by tomorrow night, so we did the next best thing. We annihilated the world before your very ears and utterly destroyed the Somerville Theatre. You will be relieved, I hope, to learn that we didn't mean it, and that both institutions are still open for business. So goodbye everybody, and remember please for the next day or so the terrible lesson you learned tonight. That grinning, glowing, globular invader of your living room is an inhabitant of the pumpkin patch, and if your doorbell rings and nobody's there, that was no Martian'—" She took a deep breath and pointed to the woman walking beside them. "It's _her._ "

Halloween inclined her head. "I suppose I have to own that, too."

Saavik asked, "Are we going… far?"

"Very far," Halloween replied. "It'll be a few minutes' walk."

_—On this street, that makes sense._

"So…" Daria asked, "Do you still play in a band?"

"I hold a couple drumsticks now and then," Halloween said. "But I've come into a new career since last we met."

"And that would be?"

Without interrupting her stride, Halloween looked Daria up and down. "When I first spotted you and your friends checking in, you wore a parka and matching après-ski boots. The Doc Martens you're wearing with your costume are unscuffed, and you've relaced them since yesterday afternoon. Now, unlike then, the bottom three holes are unthreaded. Inference: your boots are not just new, but so new they have not yet broken in, and you have been adjusting them to try and find a tolerable fit. Balance of probability: you did not plan on coming to the convention and made the decision only within the past few days."

Saavik said, "You're a detective."

Halloween turned up the collar on her coat.

Daria deadpanned, "How'd that happen?"

"Garden-variety syncretism, I should think," said Halloween. "All that belief had to go somewhere. Perhaps it was only fitting that it arrive with the one who already presided over stories coming back from the grave." Her lips quirked again. "Or perhaps all those years of mischief gave me a taste for trouble and a healthy disrespect for the official police."

Daria figured it would be a good idea to process this, if that were possible. "Let me guess. You're here on a case."

Halloween nodded—a sharp, abrupt movement. "A series of thefts in the far realms. All of them, to the best knowledge of the regional authorities concerned, impossible. A skull from a royal crypt in Aurelia Minor. The mummy of a child taken to the Faerie Wilds to make a place for a changeling. Two hollow agates of ceremonial poison, the first causing death and the second a trance. The other egg of the Phoenix, from—" She broke off.

Saavik asked, "What is it?"

Halloween was patting the pockets of her coat. "I had a list," she said. She stopped in her tracks and began pulling scraps of crumpled paper from one pocket, briefly scanning them and stuffing them in another. "My boyfriend is always telling me I should keep notes on my phone, but I can't seem to break my old habits." She paused and held up a folded note. "Huh, a wedding invitation." She crammed it into another pocket, a new one on the inside of her coat. "Oh," she said, producing a curled-over brown paper bag. "Chestnuts?"

* * *

They came to the foot of a bridge. A last whorl of cherry blossoms spun before them and settled against the oak beams which made up the path.

Saavik grasped Daria's hand more tightly. "Is this where we have to hold our breath so they can't tell we're human?"

Halloween clucked her tongue. "Aw, no, not here. Most of those that come this way _are_ human, after all."

Daria looked from the holiday spirit to the bridge and back again. "Most?"

But Halloween was already moving forward again.

Daria decided to think about something else. "So… How did you come to be looking for me again, after all these years? Sorry I didn't keep in touch, you know, what with my thinking you were all just the cast of my most legal drug trip."

Saavik asked, sotto voce, "Hey, does that mean—"

Halloween now stooped and shambled as she walked. "That was more of a vision than a trip, if you get my meaning. No? Well, put it like this: my friends and I left home, ended up in Lawndale. You were the one who was in the right state to perceive us. Instead of leaving your plane altogether, you dreamed _in_ Lawndale. I'll bet your memories of what happened got a bit garbled."

"Kinda lost over here," Saavik said.

"Oh? Well, the details don't matter that much. The upshot is, people who have a special interaction with the Dreaming, an experience out of the ordinary, tend to pick up a certain tinge. And then your friend Jane—"

"Jane?" Daria chirped.

"Her company. The movie-prop workshop. You know they got an endowment from Farrell Multinational? Well, Mr. Farrell is an associate of the Dreaming. From the days of the last Dream in charge. He is what you might call an old god, with a new job. Nice guy, too, if you ever get the chance to meet him. Wears pink suits, sounds like Billie Dee Williams."

"Sorry," Daria said. "I'm still working on the part about `an old god.'"

"Babylon," Halloween replied, "and I think the Akkadian Empire of Sargon before that. His worshipers were fading away, kids those days, you know? And on the old Dream King's advice, he found other ways to keep going."

They had reached the midpoint of the bridge. The city lights before them were farther away than they had been.

"The gods need belief," Saavik said.

"Yes, yes they do. I guess I should say `we,' but I'm not nearly in the league of some of those guys, and I don't come from quite the same place, not exactly." She was rummaging in her raincoat pockets again. "Where was I? Oh, right, Mr. Farrell. He likes to support the arts, you know. Part of being rich."

The bridge now seemed to end, not in the city, but in an island which had arisen in the channel.

Halloween produced a bar of plain chocolate and began nibbling on a corner of it. "Part of being rich, part of being an old god. One must strive to fill a need in the human heart, to inhabit a role which the people crave to believe is occupied." Her stoop was more pronounced now, and she held the chocolate bar between the thumb and index finger of her left hand. Though the air was still, her hair apppeared to tousle and sway in a breeze. "I expect that people want the rich to be doing something with all their wealth and power, something less _tacky_ than the excesses reported in the gossip blogs. Machinations with weight and consequence. So, Farrell patronizes the arts, and Jane and her collaborators receive a financial infusion."

The path was sloping down, now, towards a sandy beach.

"And that had nothing to do with me?"

"Not a thing. But there are certain mechanisms in place to detect when separate individuals of significance to the Dreaming come into contact. That can be a harbinger of… events having notable import."

Saavik said, "So when you moved back in with Jane…"

"Think of it," Halloween elaborated, "as though you crossed a tripwire, which only a person having a past like yours with the Dreaming could activate. You came to my attention, and the Lord Shaper decided that an arrangement might be mutually beneficial—for all three of us."

Daria's boots sank a few centimeters into dry sand.

Halloween inquired, "Look familiar? You visited here, a couple times, accompanied by projections of your mind, in the shape of your friends."

"Holiday Island," said Daria.

* * *

They came to a set of stairs, shallow concrete steps leading up to a weathered, institutional building.

"It's dream school!"

Daria regarded Saavik with mild puzzlement. "Come again?"

"Where you go when it's final exam day, only you forgot you were in the class and haven't been going for months, and you start to think, hey, didn't I graduate at some point? Are they going to take away my college diploma if I don't pass? Why is the barista from the place across from my job in my biology class? And why are we dissecting Oompa-Loompas?"

"To understand how they avoid diabetes?"

Halloween seized the handles of the big double doors and swung them open. "Right this way, you guys."

"Smells just like Laaaawndale High," Daria said.

"Not far now," Halloween called back, breaking into a jog and rounding a corner.

Saavik and Daria sped up to follow, and then stopped.

The hallway was empty.

Lockers on both sides. A broken desk chair left beside a classroom door. A water fountain recessed into the wall, next to a bathroom marked **MEN**.

"Um," Saavik said.

"Maybe she had to tend to a cauldron?" Daria offered.

They looked about. A banner ran over the row of lockers on their right. **FELLOW HOLIDAYS,** it read. **YOUR ICHOR IS NEEDED. DON'T DELAY, GIVE TODAY!**

A semitransparent humanoid brushed past them, minding its own business.

"Daria… who was that?"

Others began to pour out of the classrooms, forming little knots of silent conversation, closing in around the two visitors.

"Daria. That one is carrying his own head."

"Um, at a guess, Saint Denis. He's the patron saint of France. First bishop of Paris. Martyred in the… third century?"

The specter tucked its head under one arm as it spun the dial on its locker. The head nodded to another figure that passed by, a young man in chain mail, who raised an arm and saluted with a quick wave of two fingers.

The arm was lacerated through the armor, but it did not bleed.

"These wounds he had on Crispin's Day," Daria said, under her breath.

Saavik tugged at her. "Maybe she went in one of the rooms."

The first door led into a geography classroom. Daria had time to notice that the map pulled down in front of the blackboard was of **GHULHEIM AND ENVIRONS** before Saavik was pulling her onwards.

The next door was narrower, and closed. "Supply closet?" Daria figured aloud.

"Might as well try." With her free hand, Saavik twisted the knob.

Inside, they found Jane Lane, seated on a low shelf, her back to the wall.

And, wrapped fairly around her, one hand exploring the space between Jane's over-the-knee socks and her skirt, was Daria.

_—That bodysuit follows every curve I have and some I'm pretty sure I don't._

"Uh," said Daria.

"Mmm," said Daria, brushing back her feathery blue hair as she lavished kisses on Jane's willing neck.

_—That's…_

_—Rei. Dareia. Dareia Ayanami._

Saavik was staring slack-jawed.

"This is not my dream," Daria said, standing on the threshold, feeling Saavik's hand start to slip away.

In the room, Dareia was saying nothing.

"Someone else's fantasies," Daria stated.

Jane took her lover by the shoulders. "Get down and lick, Morgendorffer," she instructed.

Dareia gracefully knelt.

Daria looked away. She let her hands fall to her side, and she turned, and she leaned against the cold metal of a locker.

"Kraaawrk!"

"Huh?" Daria straightened her posture.

The new arrival was a bird. A raven, which flapped between the meandering holidays and settled at her feet. "You're Daria? Daria Morgendorffer, from Boston?"

"Uh, yes. I am."

"Name's Matthew. I'm the boss's raven. I'm supposed to bring you to meet him."

"He's waiting?"

"Yup. We better get moving." Matthew looked at Saavik, then into the supply closet. "Or, we could hang here and chill for a few."

"I'd like some answers, please," Daria told him.

The corvid grumbled and rose into the air again. "Is she coming with—"

Saavik was, by all appearances, lost to them both, enraptured.

"Eh," said Matthew. "Looks like she's out of it now. She'll be all right, just dreaming regular. Come on, we'll go someplace better than a high school."

Daria followed the raven. The spectral crowd was thinning. Looking back, she saw her friend standing, amazed, swaying a little on her feet, and then they rounded another corner and she was lost from view.

"Was that her dream we saw?" Daria asked.

"Huh? Could have been. Probably was."

"You know," Daria mused, "this whole trip has a certain fairy-tale quality to it. One guide at a time, for each part of the journey."

"Yeah," said Matthew. "This place gets to be like that. There it is, up ahead."

Another set of double doors, this time a pair which Daria recognized well.

"The Lawndale High library?"

"You spent a lot of time there?"

"It and the roof were the two places in school I didn't hate." Daria reflected a moment. "One day, they met and became one."

"Say wha?"

They entered the library.

The shelves were taller than Daria twice over, and made of richly-stained wood. The books, thousands upon tens of thousands of them, were bound in leather and titled in charcoal ink, or in gold and silver leaf. Beams of afternoon sunlight descended from high windows in opposite walls, converging in the air, making a path which she followed while staring about herself in all directions, walking now forwards, now backwards, her coat trailing with every turn.

_—"I have always imagined Paradise to be a kind of library."_

Matthew settled down on a trolley, one which bore the placard, **Reshelve at your Own Risk**.

Daria loked at the books which had been left on the cart.

" _The Pixel and the Quantum,_ by John Archibald Wheeler. _Be Seeing You: The Shooting Script,_ by Philip K. Dick. And… _A Practical Course in Power Electronics,_ by Amy Barksdale?"

"You know them?"

 _—Books of dreams unwritten,_ thought Daria. _—No, wait, that's not quite right—_

"This is not the Lawndale High library," Daria said. "It's much too… everything."

"Correct. It is mine, and I welcome you."

She turned to face the speaker, who rose from his divan and motioned her to sit in the matching chair which faced it across a low table.

He had the features of a young man, but the gravity of one much older, as though a calcite statue of a teenage pharaoh had been granted life after a few dozen centuries to contemplate its model's misdeeds. He wore a plain white robe, bound at the waist by a pale gray sash. His only ornament was an emerald hanging against his chest on a gold chain which looped around his neck. Matthew flew to alight on his shoulder.

It seemed a foolish thing to ask, but Daria could think of nothing else. "Am I dead?"

"Not in the slightest," the man— _no, not a man, something else, something more_ —said. "That would seriously inconvenience both of us." He paused. "I am Dream of the Endless, and I oversee this realm. You might think of me as a king, or as an anthropomorphic personification of an aspect of life. Prior generations of humanity have found the `king' metaphor more congenial. In any event, when I was mortal, my name was Daniel."

Daria's throat was going all scratchy again. "And my friend?"

"She is safe. As Matthew perhaps tried to explain, she underwent a loss of lucidity: Though you both entered the Dreaming fully conscious, she now experiences it in the manner of an ordinary dream. The path you walked was intended for you, Daria Morgendorffer, but it will bring her no harm."

Daria plodded to the chair which he had offered and sat down.

Dream of the Endless sat as well. "Tea? Or wine?"

"Yes… Yes please."

Dream—Daniel?—smiled gently and poured tea into a cup which Daria had not noticed, from a teapot which she was pretty confident had not existed a moment before. He handed her the china cup and saucer. The liquid looked like tea, and smelled delightful.

She sipped. "Barley?"

"It is to your liking?"

"Oh, very much so."

_—It is, I'd say, uncannily like the tea at the sushi restaurant where I had my first real date with the most promising (but still doomed in retrospect) boyfriend prospect at university, the former roommate of my former roommate's fella, the one who I'd been told loved sushi, which I had never liked amazingly much, so I said nothing and we went out and the unagi was delicious…_

Daniel poured a cup for himself and sat back. "I am glad. As Halloween informed you, I have a deal to offer you. I believe it will benefit her, the Dreaming as a whole, and you as well. You are free to turn it down. If you do so, the events of this night will slip from your memory like ordinary dreams do, and you will be able to go on living your life as you were before."

"You want me to become the Watson to Halloween's Sherlock?"

Matthew piped up. "Got it in one!"

Daniel's reaction to the bird was, she decided, best classified as _indulgent._ Then he grew serious again. "I believe you have already begun to appreciate the function of archetypes in my domain. Fragments of tales, recurring motifs, the genetic materials of the fantasies which have flourished in human minds."

"Up to and including gods," Daria said.

"Yes. So many have been born in this realm. Most of those who have walked the waking world have returned here again, as human wills have drifted away from them. Those who survive sometimes do so by developing new aspects, performing new functions."

"Like playing the drums in a hiphop-punk-electronica band," Daria suggested.

"Among other possibilities. For some years, Halloween has served as an agent of mine, and quite capably. She has become not just an investigator, but the focus of that archetype."

"And the archetypal detective always has an assistant."

"A confidant, a counterpart. In some tales, the Watson is the villain, brought into the detective's plans, made to listen and grow unnerved as the sleuth unravels what had seemed to be the perfect murder."

"But you don't have a prime suspect, so you need a counterpart who can follow Halloween around, be amazed, ask her the right questions. And record it all for posterity."

"Yes."

"And what do I get out of this deal?"

Daniel poured her a fresh cup of barley tea. She was barely aware that she had finished her first. "My predecessor in the role of Dream made a certain bargain with a human, a little over four centuries ago. The human, a poet and playwright by aspiration, created two plays. One was a merry celebration of dreams and a comic perspective on classical mythology. The other, written a lifetime later, was a romance, but also an exploration of the responsibilities of magic. In exchange for these two plays, my predecessor granted the author the wellsprings of the Dreaming, the ability to reach within himself and find images for all occasions which had captivated and prospered in minds long past. With them to draw upon, his own talent was able to strengthen itself, and move souls to this day."

Daria set her teacup down very carefully. "Shakespeare. The Dream King before you made a deal with William Shakespeare. And that's why he _was_ Shakespeare."

"To put it briefly, yes. And I am quite willing to do the same for you. I would, after all, like my agent Halloween to have the best writer possible for her assistant."

Matthew flapped his wings. "Pretty sweet deal, huh? And I gotta admit, I think you're starting in a better place than he was. I mean, Melody Glass is bitchin."

"As I see it," Daniel said, "the local authorities investigating various crimes of interest will dream, as they normally do, and they will come here, to my library, or to some other convenient location. As they dream, they will explain their problems to a consulting detective, whom they need never suspect exists beyond their own sleeping imaginations. When they wake, they will remember what you two deem it important that they retain and forget the rest. For your part, you need only sleep, as you typically do, and Halloween will call upon you when your assistance is desired."

"I just go about my day, and sometimes when I take a nap, I pop up here and take notes while a demigod sleuth solves crimes. And in exchange I get inspiration on tap so I can grow into a literary genius." Daria shook herself. "I'm sorry, but I don't have the context to even begin processing that."

Matthew squawked. "You think you got it bad? Try driving drunk and killing yourself and being asked if you want to stay on as the raven for the Dream King."

Daria deadpanned, "I concede that the bird has a point."

"My predecessor," Daniel told her, "was an entity much taken with continuity, tradition—a personage of great dignity. When he made his deal with a young William Shakespeare, he expected that man to give voice to the Great Stories of ages past. And, indeed, so the author did. Later generations reworked his plays, replacing tragic endings with happy ones, for example. My predecessor saw this as a natural but temporary diversion. `The Great Stories will always return to their original forms,' he put it. I do not take quite the same view of the matter."

"No?"

 _—King Lear,_ she thought. _—Romeo and Juliet. Any other Shakespeare plays which had upbeat endings tacked on? Frailty, thy name is memory._

"If the experiences of my predecessor taught me anything, it is that a fixed point is not an idol to be sought for its own sake." 

Daniel—Dream of the Endless—did not seem eager to elaborate. Matthew shifted uneasily from one foot to the other.

"My kind are not what you would call `proactive,' by our nature," Daniel said.

"Overtly meddling in mortal affairs isn't among your core competencies," Daria quipped.

"In so many words. We—myself, and the others of my… family—tend to react, more than we _act._ We could, indeed, forsake our domains, and life would continue, albeit with nothing taking _responsibility_ for those aspects of life which had fallen under our rubrics. What you might call the _purpose_ behind events would no longer be subtle, but nonexistent."

"I… see."

"You are troubled?"

"It's just that you're verging into that `God works in mysterious ways' territory—so `mysterious' that it's indistinguishable from `no way at all' as far as trying to live a good life here on Earth is concerned."

"We are not charged with making your lives _pleasant,_ " Daniel said. "Or fair, or just."

"Good. Because if you were, I'd have to tell you that you've been doing a shitcock job so far."

Matthew squawked and crowed. "Hey boss! I like this one."

"We do, on occasion, step out of our habitual roles," Daniel said. "Such interventions are in certain circumstances necessary, usually to avert undesirable consequences whose magnitudes and natures are essentially unprecedented in recorded human history."

_—Is he pissed? No, not quite. He's… working up to something big._

"Are you… Does this have to do with why you brought me here? Is this deal you're offering one of these `interventions'?"

Daniel nodded.

_—Oh ho-o-o-ly shiiiiiiiii—_

"Suffice for the moment to say that significant changes are afoot," Daniel told her. "Changes due to the development of your civilization, of your species and the role it plays on the planet you inhabit."

"The planet we're poisoning?"

"That is one corner of the problem, yes. New challenges have arisen. The matter which Halloween is investigating will be, I am certain, only the first. Meeting them successfully and surviving through the aftermath will require a great many novel conceptions. Quite likely, a new ethics. Conceivably, a new interplay between science and myth."

"And _I_ am supposed to…"

"Interventions, as I'm sure you have observed, have unpredictable consequences."

_—For me, hell yes. For you, too?_

Daniel went on. "Were what you would call a `supernatural' agency truly to affect humanity directly, humans would build a mythology around the event. Stories would be told and retold largely according to their ability to transform emotions. Soon, given enough emotional power, new gods of the kind born of the human heart would walk your world, their forms partly inspired by the original intervention and partly a human work."

_—Somehow, I don't think that's only a metaphor. Or, in this place, metaphors are not "only."_

"So," Daria said aloud, "you need a human agent? Whatever you're doing to help us along has to look like it comes from us ourselves?"

"It _will_ come from you, Daria Morgendorffer. What you write—should you choose to accept my offer—will be products of your creativity which I myself would be unable to produce."

Something about that made sense. He was Dream, she was a storyteller—and dream logic did not work like story logic. She thought back over all the times that she had awoken with an idea that she had to write down. Images, fragments of dialogue, settings, occupations, moods, conflicts, yes, but never plots entire which functioned as the eye took in the printed page.

"I think I'm starting to see," Daria said. "You want to give me the chance to grow into a new Shakespeare?"

"Yes."

"I'll never lack for inspiration."

"Yes. You will be able to resolve problems you face as you construct stories, though the problems you encounter will depend on the choices you make, following your own inclinations which I cannot mimic."

"And the price I pay for this is to help a holiday spirit fight crime."

"Concisely put. I must warn you: the gift I can provide you is far more easily given than it could be returned."

"I can't give it back without, what, tearing my soul to pieces?"

"That is, perhaps, a dramatic statement, but essentially true. You would _live,_ and not descend into madness—"

Matthew interjected, "That's his sister's job."

"My younger sister," affirmed the Lord Shaper, "known as Delirium. As I was saying, you would live, but returning to exactly the state of creativity in which you exist now would be all but impossible."

_—But why would I give up a gift like that?_

Daria stared at her toes.

"Look at it one way," she said, "and I'm already a lost cause. I try to think everything through by writing. In all the worst times, when I was having to take care of Jane, when Tom's father died the year after that and right in the middle of all that mess at Bromwell, when… when my heart got broken… there's always a part of me that comes along, saying in my head, `There's good meat in this.' What I think you're asking of me, is that I become like I am, but more so."

"To an extent which you may find deleterious. This deal took a toll on Shakespeare, essentially dominating his life; but that is a sample of only one person, perhaps too small a pool to draw conclusions from."

"And will you want specific works from me? Like, I gather, your predecessor commissioned _Midsummer_ and _The Tempest._ "

Daniel smiled softly. "My motivations for offering this deal are somewhat different from my predecessor's. I am not so concerned with specific works at the moment. The first priority is that you help Halloween develop her aspect. Later, perhaps, I might come to you with a request for a special occasion."

"I… I'd like to think about this for a few minutes," Daria said.

Daniel nodded and rose to his feet.

"Come, let us walk," he said.

"Mm, OK." Daria stood, her knees a little stiff.

Matthew fluttered from his perch and flew into one of the vaulted alcoves. Daniel turned to follow, inviting Daria with a palm-up wave of his right hand. She dusted off her coat and joined him.

They walked into the alcove. On the hewn-stone wall was a painting of a room, rendered in amber and burnt-sienna tones. Matthew circled over their heads and then flapped his way into the painting. Daniel and Daria followed.

This room was a heptagonal chamber. Judging by the low bookshelves, their contents locked behind glass, Daria guessed that this was a specialized annex of some sort. The wall behind them featured a fresco of the main library. In front of the other six walls were five amber statues and an empty plinth. The statue closest to her was of a young woman, her head half-shaved, her fingers tugging the locks that tumbled down over her shoulder. Trapped inside the carving were a half-dozen moths, which might have been moving.

Matthew flew upward, and a helical staircase grew downward. _Growth_ was the only word Daria could find for the process: the cold wrought iron flowed and twisted, like tendrils of a vine filmed in time-lapse.

"I thought you would enjoy a view from the castle roof," Daniel said.

"Oh. Yes. Definitely." She placed her right boot on the first step and began to climb the helix beside Daniel.

"So, ah," she began. "I guess I'd kick myself with my new Docs if I didn't ask this, so… If you _literally are_ Dream, do you know what my dreams mean? Is that part of your job?"

"For example?"

"Well, like… That repeating dream I had, where my family died after eating those poison berries on that camping trip. Or the one where Boston and Lawndale and Chicago were all mixed together as part of one big city where everyone's job was performing funeral rites? Or, for something really scary, the one where Stacy Rowe was an Evangelion pilot."

"Or," Daniel suggested, "the time you woke up trembling because Jane Lane was infected with alien DNA, and you abandoned her to faceless operatives of a vast conspiracy."

"Yeah, sure. Like that. What does it mean?"

"Would you find it plausible," Daniel asked, "if I told you that Stacy Rowe was on your mind because you had met her unexpectedly at a significant time in your life, and you were struck by how she, of all your sister's friends, was one whom Quinn had kept in contact with all these years? Would it be beyond belief that you feared you could not support Jane, and that your fear manifested itself in a mileau drawn from the stories you two grew up watching together?"

"That sounds plausible." Daria stopped. Daniel paused, standing two steps above her, and looked back. "I'd have said so myself, yesterday. But not today." She took a deep breath. "If dreams _were_ just random recombinations of what we already have in our heads, and `interpreting' them was just like ad-libbing your way through an inkblot test, then there—there wouldn't be any need for _you._ "

"Krawwwr!" Matthew landed on her shoulder. "She's got you there, boss."

Daniel's mouth quirked briefly. He turned and began to climb the stairs again.

"`Caesar crossed the Rubicon,'" Daniel said, "`and was a menace to Rome's freedom. He is also an American schoolroom pest, made into one by the reaction of our schoolboys on his writings. The added predicate is as true of him as the earlier ones.'"

"I'll take… William James for eight hundred?"

"Yes. An _interpretation_ of a dream is a story about that dream which endures in the Darwinian contest of the waking world. The process of dreaming itself is the genesis in shreds and patches of new experiences, inserting themselves into the greater weave, changing their environs and being changed themselves."

"Uh, boss," Matthew put in. "I've been around here a while, and you've still lost me."

The ceiling irised open and swiveled away above them.

"Behold, Daria Morgendorffer: the heart of the Dreaming."


	6. Chapter 6

**Notes for the Chapter:**

>  **PREVIOUSLY, ON _DARIA_ :** Thirteen years or so after high school, Our Heroine is a washed-up academic with a series of advanced degrees, failed relationships and irregularly successful writing efforts behind her. She left her cheating boyfriend and moved back to Boston, to live with her friend Jane Lane. Jane, now running an art shop specializing in custom movie and TV props, introduced her to a social circle featuring both old and new faces. Soon, friendship got the better of caution, and Daria found herself agreeing to cosplay Edward Elric at a science-fiction and fantasy convention.
> 
> At the convention, Daria finds herself out of place, but at just the right time to be a sympathetic listener for Saavik—a clerk, aspiring actor and Tom Sloane's girlfriend. Their night takes a turn for the fantastical when a woman from Daria's past arrives with a business proposal... from the Sandman, Dream of the Endless.
> 
>  **Content note:** Frank discussion of physical intimacy. On-screen portrayal thereof at maybe a soft R. Brief violence. One instance of homophobic language. [Adult 4chan Man](http://i.imgur.com/ZWkT1cj.jpg).

Daria woke quietly.

She was in a bed, at the hotel, in the entertaining suite.

_—A storm frozen over the sea—_

She flexed her shoulders and felt her clothes on her body.

_—The castle—towers and courtyards and a thousand hot lanterns in motion around and about—_

Her arms and hands were under the thick blanket. She moved her thumbs across her palms. The skin was bare. Both the glove and the gauntlet were gone.

She wiggled her toes. The Post-Docs had vanished from her feet. It was as if she had slept unremarkably in her jeans, socks and sweater. With an impulsive motion, she pulled her hands out from beneath the bedclothes and stared at them.

"Nothing," she whispered.

She realized from the general dim blurriness that her glasses were missing from her face and that the room was only being lit by the indirect light of early morning.

Still whispering, she reasoned to herself: "This is the part where I look over and find a token beside my bed which proves it wasn't just a dream after all. A gold brick would do nicely."

Daria's fingers found her glasses, folded up beside the digital clock, where she habitually left them any time she stayed in a hotel. She put them on and, blinking, studied the space beside her mattress.

The clock. A lamp, with an electrical outlet in its base. Her phone charger. Her new telephone. Nothing unusual—

"Ow. I think I rolled onto something."

Daria spun about. The mass of blanket on her other side was moving. Something was preparing to emerge. Out from under the edge, within arm's reach from where her sleeping head had rested—there! Delicate fingers, a disarray of black hair, and—

"Saavik?"

Daria watched the other young woman in her bed fight back a yawn and then succumb to it.

The other woman in Daria's bed held up a pendant on a thin silvery chain. "Spider," she said, a little dulled with just-woken-up-ness. "Nice."

Wordlessly, Daria took the metal jewel. She stared at it, because she was not sure whether staring at it or at her unexpected bedmate would be easier, and this choice seemed more polite.

"Uh. Sleep well?" she asked Saavik, still not looking at her.

"Mmygh. Pretty well, I guess." Saavik propped herself halfway up on her elbows.

The khaki uniform dress was hanging from a hook on the bedroom door, next to Daria's alchemist overcoat. Her Post-Docs were upright on the floor, the gauntlet posed finger-end-up against the wall beside them.

Daria fumbled for her voice. "Any dreams?"

"Maybe. Lemme think. Something about cherry trees in bloom, and swimming in a fountain and running out because of a thunderstorm, and… shit. There was more. I can't remember. I must have dozed off in the movie room. Was the second movie about ghosts?" She sat up and rubbed her eyes. "Ah, that's all I've got. Except for the bit which would be TMI."

_—Loss of lucidity. Dreaming regular. Which means that between us, I'm the only one who remembers that whole journey._

Daria enclosed the spider pendant in a loose fist.

Saavik said, "Thanks for staying with me last night."

_—How I'm wishing right now that you had stayed with me for the rest of it—_

And then she looked up at her companion, looked closely for the first time since they had awoken.

Saavik was regarding her, levelly, a frank curiosity in her eyes.

Daria pulled her legs in and sat upright, her spine a ramrod.

"You're not thinking—you don't mean you want—" she sputtered.

The younger woman smiled, softly, the interest in her gaze undiminished.

"Why not? We're already in bed together. In my experience, that's often the hardest part."

Daria coughed. _But I'm straight_ and _but you're dating Tom_ warred for primacy within her, and then she opened her mouth to speak, and the victorious thought came out:

"Why me?"

"You're kidding!" And then a slight shift in Saavik's features, concern creeping in, a signal that she was seeing now an inkling of just how Daria had been treating herself, for a very long time. "You're kidding," Saavik said again, more gently. "Let's think. You're funny. Honest. Wicked smart. And when your hair is mussed like that, you're pretty cute."

"Cute?" The word popped out.

"Mmm. _Especially_ with the glasses. They make my heart go all, `Oh Professor, I'd do just _anything_ to pass your class.'"

Daria forced herself to breathe deeply and deliberately. "Please," she said, "don't play around with me on this." She closed her eyes, then opened them again when she felt fingertips brushing against her wrist.

"Hey," Saavik said. "No joke."

Daria realized that her friend was very close now, and that she was staring into Saavik's face.

_—We are on the edge of locking eyes._

This time, the words emerged correctly. "But… Tom." _—Most of the words, anyway._

"Open relationship," Saavik replied, easily. "We talked a lot about it when we decided to get serious. It made sense for lots of reasons. But strangely enough, the option of acting on it never came up after that. Nobody else has really turned our heads."

_—OK. OK. That makes sense. In this brave new world of queerpolykink drama vortices, it sounds downright pedestrian._

_—So. Tell her. I'm straight. Flattered, but very straight. Charmed, but—_

"I'm…" Daria's voice caught, and she swallowed and tried again. "I'm really flattered, but… Could we kiss to see if it works?"

Daria realized her hands were both balled into fists when Saavik's enclosed them.

_—This is getting serious. Thumbs are being rubbed along each other. My heart most definitely appears to be accelerating its beat. Tingles all over my face._

_—And now a finger is brushing the periphery of my aforesaid face, and the nearness of her is—_

"Who on Earth," whispered Saavik, "could ever have told you that you weren't adorable?"

_—Myself, first of all, but is that really fair to—_

And now two hands were voyaging into her hair, and she leaned forward, and—

_—foom._

Saavik pulled away for air first.

"Dammit," Daria said. "Dammit. You got me turned on."

Saavik's touch was now exploring Daria's sides, just below her ribs.

"You weren't expecting that?"

"Not with a girl," Daria admitted. "But it was very good. You should know. You were there."

Her friend giggled. "Normally I have a rule that I wait a month after the first kiss to do anything more serious than kissing, but I'm willing to skip a step or two if you—"

"I've been tested," Daria blurted out. "After I found out my boyfriend had been cheating on me. I got checked. I'm clean."

"Well. Tom and I had full panels done when we got serious. And like I said, we've been monogamous since then. We're both clean, too. And now that we've got _that_ out of the way—I haven't had any surgery yet. Long story. A lot of it is actually kind of dull. The important thing is, I don't really _like_ other people manipulating my leftover bits. All the other default erogenous zones are fair play."

_—I am in bed with a woman. One for whom sex is A Thing. An activity to be discussed, investigated, refined, improved. More than any question of gender, that is unprecedented—_

"Daria? You OK?"

"OK."

"Anything you want me to know?"

"I'm nervous." Daria reached over to her phone and dropped the spider necklace onto the bedside table. Then, carefully, she put her arms around her friend.

The kiss grew deeper, slowly. Neither of them wanted to hurry.

* * *

Daria shut off the shower, leaned against the tile wall for a long moment, and then reached an arm outside her curtained bubble of steam to fumble for the towel hanging on its hook. "Mmm, plushy," she thought aloud as she wrapped the towel about her head and set about scrabbling her hair dry.

 _—I can't deal with this,_ she thought. _—Last night had too much weird going down for me to process—if half—if any of that is true, it changes—it changes everything. —And with this morning on top of that, I don't even have a frame of reference for normal, do I?_

She finished drying herself to her satisfaction and stepped out of the shower stall, sandals slapping against the cold floor. _—Boston in January,_ she thought. _—I am prepared for this. Socks first, then everything else._

She found the pile of clothes she had left on the counter and sorted them by feel. She had pulled a shirt over her head and was about to fasten her black jeans when she realized one more thing that had gone horribly wrong. "Dammit, Quinn," she deadpanned. "I turn to you in my darkest moment of crisis, and this is what I get? Why do my clothes all match? Why should my sweater go with my socks, dammit?"

 _—Boston. January,_ she thought again, and pulled on the forest-green cuddly jumper.

She sent her fingers out over the countertop, seeking her glasses. "Look around you," she said. "Just look around you!" Unfolding the glasses: "Have you worked out what it is we're looking for?" Sliding them onto her face: "Correct! The answer is…"

Staring at herself in the mirror.

"…Non…monogamy?"

Five minutes later, she trudged out into the center room, Doc Martens plomping against the hardwood floor. _—Still quite the posh environment,_ she thought. She realized how quickly she had grown used to Late Converted Industrial with influences of Early Modern Stoner and Art Day-Glo…but bringing someone home to all that? Well, it hadn't been exactly on her mind…

Saavik was at the bar, removing the cover from a room-service tray. She looked up and half-turned. Over her shoulder: "Did I tell you before? Those are some awesome boots."

"They hide the fact that my socks match both each other and my sweater. Oops."

"Breakfast burrito?" Saavik asked.

"Um, sure."

Saavik separated the two burrito plates and pushed one down the bar, to the spot before the stool beside her. "I just got two of the same thing. You don't mind being a veggie-vore?"

"Are you the kind who considers bacon a vegetable?"

Saavik laughed, then tossed her head in the direction of the bedrooms. "Jane's here. Got back while you were in the shower."

The door to Jane's bedroom was half-open. There was a new poster sticky-tacked to it, something which Jane had maybe taken in trade. It showed Jack Skellington and Sally the Rag-Doll taking advantage of their abilities for anatomical reassembly, and was not exactly inviting. Daria took a few steps across the room and craned her neck to glimpse inside. Jane was sprawled face-down atop the blankets. She still wore the bear jammies.

"Well, she should return to the living in three days at most," Daria said. "And… Tom?"

"He's still down at the con," Saavik said, opening the refrigerator. "Jane said he'd be back later. Was mostly talking to her pillow, though, so I might have misunderstood."

"Oh, um, Saavik?" Daria stood in the middle of the room and fidgeted. "If… if I said I revile cilantro, would you conclude that what happened earlier this morning was a mistake?"

Saavik looked at the burrito in her hands, then sniffed the ragged edge where she had bitten it off. "Be not afraid, amiga. You're safe this time."

 _—Gamine beauty,_ Daria thought. _That's the word for her._

They ate at the bar. Daria sat across from Saavik and looked mostly at her own plate. _—It really is a good breakfast burrito,_ she reflected, _despite the absence of crispy swine meat._

"Are you going back to the con today?" Daria asked. She looked up in time to see Saavik glance down.

She toyed with her fork as she replied, "I don't know. I am missing half a pair of leather gloves. Maybe I'll cruise the merchant hall and see if I can find any accessories which aren't, you know, festooned with gears."

"I'll go with you, if you like," Daria said. Saavik smiled, slightly but unmistakably. "Could always scope out the used books. I've always wanted to see where old Tom Clancy paperbacks go to die."

"All right," Saavik said. She rose and took her plate and fork to the sink.

"I just… need to make a phone call first, OK?"

"Sure," Saavik said.

Daria clomped to the room where they had slept and done everything else, and she closed the door. The pile of blankets atop the memory-foam mattress didn't look all that different from any other morning. _—Says a lot for my housekeeping,_ she thought. She thought of her bedroom at home, still chiefly furnished with boxes she had yet to open. _—I could impress her with my erudition,_ she thought, _—if I unpack the working library of Doctor Morgendorffer. If I'm so stupid as to let this go that far._

 _—No sense delaying this,_ she told herself. _—Other than, well, every reason._

Finding her phone at the end of its cable, thumbing her passcode into its faceplate. _—Huh, he's in my contacts, but she isn't. —Well, isn't that the least odd aspect of this entire situation?_

Tom answered on the second ring. "Morning becomes Elektra!"

"Hi, Tom."

Daria listened to the background noise. Cups clinking into saucers, indistinct calls from baristas announcing drinks, the open vocal rumble of a hotel lobby beyond that. "How's the con?"

"Well, it's a science-fiction con, you know. Where you go when you want to be reminded that just because somebody likes a couple of the same TV shows you do, that doesn't make them your spirit brother."

"Uh-huh."

"Treating me to more Morgendorffer eloquence?"

"Uh, Tom, I…"

Tom was silent.

"I… Ihadsexwithyourgirlfriend!"

She heard him take a sip of coffee. "You slept with Jane?"

"Eeeep!"

"Kidding!"

"You king of all bastards—"

"It's a feudal system, really, I'm only first among equals."

"You're, uh…"

"Daria," he said, "Saavik told you that she and I have an open relationship, didn't she?"

"Well, yes."

"And she explained why?"

"Not in… so many words?"

"Daria, I'm only in town one or two weeks every month, and Saavik is…going through a serious transition arc. We both really like each other. But neither of us want to hurt anyone because we can't be one hundred percent for each other."

"At least you can be sure you're her one percent." _—Dammit._

"The experience really changed you, I can tell."

Daria grumbled.

"Listen, Daria," he said. "Saavik and I agreed we'd try being open. We promised to be honest to each other about it. It's a way in which we trust each other. And, well, neither of us had exercised the option until now. So I'm glad she found someone who I know I like and admire. And frankly, I'm happy that you found someone who might be able to help you get past your recent troubles."

"Dammit, Tom," Daria said.

"What?"

"You're doing it again. You're using The Reasonable Voice."

"It goes well with my Scary Shiny Glasses."

"Tom…"

"Yes?"

"Are you going to be at the con much longer?"

"About two shots of espresso's worth."

"Saavik and I are headed that way to do some shopping. Maybe we'll cross paths?"

"I'd like that. Give me a ring when you get downstairs, OK?"

"Sure. See you soon, Tom."

"Be seeing you, Daria."

 _—I should go get my jacket,_ she thought. _—Instead I am standing here, staring at my boots._

She bent her left knee and regarded the stitches along the edge of the boot sole. Her eyes wandered up. _—Fourteen holes. Plenty of time to think while lacing and un-lacing…_

_—Saavik is waiting for me._

_—Hold on. Do these… I've been wearing sneakers for so long, I hadn't even… Do these flatter my calves?_

_—Saavik is waiting. For me._

_—Or, Morgendorffer, would you prefer the lacing to be squeezing down without the intermediary of your matching socks—_

She pushed the thought down and plucked her jacket from atop her clothes pile.

"On my way," she called. 

* * *

They stared out the window while waiting for the elevator. "Huh, that must be that skyway over to the next building," Saavik said, peering downwards. "I found it Friday afternoon while I was walking around. Coffee?"

"Um, sure."

"Hey, you know what's in that convention center while Aletheia is happening next door? The annual New England auto show!"

"Funny."

An impersonal box, glass and brushed steel, guests entering every few floors as they descended, nobody paying the two of them any mind. Saavik looked at her with mild concern. Daria said nothing.

They stepped out of the elevator, emerging on the mezzanine above the lobby. A half-dozen people were buying day passes at the registration desk.

"I think the café is just downstairs," Saavik said.

It was, and by all appearances, it was doing great business. They joined the end of the queue which bent around a rope barrier and curled between two of the round tables.

"I'll let Tom know we're here," said Saavik, sifting through her purse for her phone.

"Mmm." Daria noticed the ceiling speakers were playing something synthpoppy. A woman was singing over the interlocking beats.

>   
>  … will you hide inside my mind sweet nothing …  
> 

It sounded familiar. She tried to place it.

>   
> … I need a consort  
> A friendly face  
> I must remember biological embrace  
> I need a lover  
> I have no trace!  
> 

Daria asked, in her normal speaking voice, "What kind of demented, parasitic sadist would inject Freezepop's `I Need a Mate' into my brain on this of all mornings?"

Half of the café swiveled to look at her.

Then the other half followed, looking to see what everyone else was staring at.

Daria waited, stock-still, until the first slurp of coffee led in the renewal of ordinary activity.

"Oh, you," Saavik said through a lopsided smile. The phone in her hand chirped. "Oh! Tom says he'll meet us here."

They reached the register. Daria asked the cashier, "Has the wild peppermint been hunted to extinction? Then I'll have a… large mocha."

"Whipped cream?"

"Yes, please." She gestured to Saavik. "And I owe this one a—"

Mildly surprised, Saavik finished, "Large iced coffee, a little room for milk and sugar."

Paying for their drinks, Daria realized that the café's background score was now Lady Gaga's "Born This Way," and that Saavik was wincing.

_—Yeah, I can see that._

"Milk and sugar?" Daria asked.

"Hmmm?"

"I'll get these if you'd rather wait out in the lobby."

"Oh. Thanks. Yes. Thanks."

 _—Poor girl,_ thought Daria.

She found Saavik in the lobby and saw that Tom had arrived just a moment before. They had claimed two chairs up against a column.

"Thanks," Saavik said again, taking her coffee. She glowered. "Fucking song," she muttered.

"Something the matter?" Tom asked.

Saavik seemed reluctant to speak, choosing to mash the ice about in her cup using the plastic straw.

"You know," Daria said, "I just thought of a sequel for that song. `I Was Born This Way, but the Next Generation Will Have the Option of Bionic Implants.'"

Saavik smiled a little, and Tom, now filling in the pieces, took her hand and quickly pecked her cheek.

"Thanks, honey," Saavik told him. She looked up at Daria. "And, um, honey-2?"

"I think of myself more as a wine jelly or a Marmalade Surprise," Daria replied. "You know, something so off-putting, only the English could invent it."

"You would," Tom said.

Before Daria could add anything to that, her phone rang. She pulled it out of her jacket pocket. "Great Prairie State?" she asked aloud. "Why would my old job call me on a weekend? Excuse me." She thumbed the "accept call" icon and held the phone to her ear. "Hello?"

A burred baritone said, "Hey, Daria."

She sank into the empty chair beside Saavik. "Hi, Trent."

"You busy?"

"Well, you kind of caught me on a—a weird morning, but—what's up? What are you doing in Illinois?"

"Gig in Evanston tonight. Spinning at some college club. Stopped by to check on things."

"Ah, Trent, you did remember that I moved out of there?"

"'Course I remember. Wanted to pick up your stuff from whazzisname's apartment."

"Oh. Thank you. I don't think there was much there."

 _—A lot of my fun-to-read books stayed with Jane,_ she thought. _—Went with her to Providence instead of Brett and me to Chicago. What did I leave behind, anyway, except a week or so of business casual?_

"Not a lot. He wasn't there. His girlfriend let me in, gave me a couple boxes. She seemed the stay-at-home type."

"She would," Daria said.

"She said you might have left some things at your office. Oh, that reminds me."

A moment of dead air.

"Yes?" Daria prompted.

A new voice chirped, "Hey, office-mate!"

"Trix?"

"I can't stay long, I've all sorts of places to be—you remember what Adjunct Hell is like—but you escaped! And I couldn't resist the chance to hear your voice again."

"I understand," Daria said. "The Sirens contract me to wait out in the water and make ships run aground."

She noticed that both Tom and Saavik were listening to her side of the conversation and trying not to laugh.

"And, Daria," Trix went on, "where _did_ you find a courier like _that?_ He _is_ your best friend's brother, right? The long story you never got to tell me?"

"The very one."

"Well, I had the stuff from your old cube in the hall closet, so we've loaded it into his here station wagon, and we're taking it to the post office in a minute, before they close."

"Um, thanks, Trix. I owe you."

"Psssh. The books are going Media Mail—slow boat to Boston, eh? You can owe Trent the next time he visits you and that Jane character I've heard so much about."

_—Jane. Right. Zounds. After these two, gotta deal with—_

"Still, you can extort a kindness out of me, too."

"Fine, fine. And speaking of, here's Trent again."

"Trent?"

"Hey, Daria."

"Hey."

A silent interlude.

"Hey, Daria."

"Hey."

"Janey doing all right?"

"I'm not at home right now, but she was fine the last I saw her. She's been really kind."

"You're like family, Daria."

_—Blush response?_

"And—ahem—your part of the clan? How are Qiana and the little ones?"

Trent laughed. _—Doesn't lead into a cough any more._ "They're really good, Daria. Went into town this morning to see the museum with the T-rex."

"The Field Museum? I bet the gremlins will love that."

"Yeah. I'm starting to think they'll grow up to be mad scientists. I'll send you a picture. Sanaa loves the Legos and things you sent for Christmas. Little Daria does too."

"Oh." _—And now Saavik and Tom will get to see me degrade into a floppy, sentimental—_

"Would you like that?"

"Yes, yes. I would."

"OK. Oh, Trix wants to talk to you again. Tell Janey that I said hello."

"I will. I will. Take care of yourself, Trent."

"Yes'm."

She heard Trix take the phone.

"Daria? We're about to head out. I just wanted to say that—that you got a really raw deal. But you mean a lot to me, even though we kind of had to warm up to each other, and—and—I just wanted to give you my best wishes."

"Same to you. See you around."

"Bye, Daria. Good luck."

Daria held her phone in her lap and stared at it for a moment. "Hey, you guys. You wanted to hit the merchant hall, right?" She directed the question to Saavik.

"Sure."

"Tom, would you go with her? I'd like to sit and think for a bit."

"My pleasure." They rose. Saavik leaned over, took Daria's hand and squeezed briefly. She then linked arms with Tom, and the two of them headed for the stairs at the far end of the lobby.

"The worst part is," she said as they walked away, "I kind of liked `Paparazzi.' It had a beat and you could karaoke to it…" 

_—Daria the Younger. Off to see the T-rex._

_—Mad scientist? No, evil genius._

_—Paparazzi?_

Daria thumbed the unlock code into her phone and opened its web browser. "Damn lyric sites…" She found a notebook and a pen in her jacket, and she began to write.

* * *

"Three corset-makers and a Restraints-R-Us," Saavik said, holding Tom's hand, "but nobody selling gloves."

"Not even with gears glued on," Tom added.

Daria had her pen gripped in her teeth. She passed her notebook to Saavik, who took it with an eyebrow lifted in puzzlement.

"Evil Genius," she read. "Oh, it's in verse." She scanned down the page, a smile twitching at her lips and growing wider as she read, until she began to sing:

>   
> I've the master plan  
> And soon you'll bow before the  
> Evil—Evil Genius!  
> Rest assured your overlord  
> Is true to form to be an  
> Evil—Evil Genius!
> 
> Old school mastermind  
> For I won't stop until the world is mine!  
> 

"I like it," Tom said. "But then again, of course I would." He looked from the notebook, up to Saavik, then over to—"Daria? Daria?"

Saavik regarded her with an expression that, Daria thought, blended amusement with just a touch of concern. "Daria?" she asked. "You… you look like you're feeling a flush steal over your features."

"Yeah," Tom said. "Damn flush, tell it to give your features back."

Daria swallowed. "It's just that I've never… I've never slept with anyone who could be my collaborator."

And now Saavik glanced down, avoiding eye contact for just a second, as if caught unawares by a shift to the serious. "Well," she began.

Tom took her hand.

He said, "I think something nice happened for both of you this morning. And it's something we'll all have to talk about. But maybe today is too soon for—"

He broke off as a voice from across the lobby rose in anger.

"Well _maybe_ I want a hero who doesn't sound like a sodding racist uncle on Facebook!"

Daria, Tom and Saavik looked to the source of the disturbance.

A man in a leather jacket, with a guitar case at his feet and spiky hair on his head, was rising from his chair. He bellowed, "Or haven't you grown up since you first burst your spots?"

"Oh no," Daria whispered.

The man sitting across from the guitarist, the man who had apparently prompted the guitarist's outburst, was rising now too. He wore a black cape, a black suit and a Guy Fawkes mask. He loomed over the musician, whose back was to Daria.

Then, the tall man in the Guy Fawkes mask growled a single word: "Fag."

The musician replied, "Then smoke me."

The tall man in the Guy Fawkes mask heaved back his shoulder and swung his fist at the punk musician.

The musician blocked the blow with a swift move of his left arm, and in a seeming continuation of that motion, smoothly stepped in and clipped the tall man in his solar plexus.

Now people were paying attention. Two security guards were stepping out from behind the hotel clerks' counter.

The guitarist grabbed his crotch. "Remember, remember, the girth of my member!" He seized his guitar case, swung it onto his back, leapt over the fallen man and then over a planter box, and sprinted to the revolving door. Pushing his way into it, he turned to Daria, exactly to her, and called out, "She'll be seeing you tonight!"

And then he was gone.

Tom asked, "Do we know that guy?"


	7. Chapter 7

**Notes for the Chapter:**

>  **Fair warning:** In my dubious wisdom, I have decreed that it is time for a flashback. This is where we get to see the cascading aftereffects of Jane Lane's summer in the art colony play out in her college years. The escapade with Jodie Landon was recounted in Chapter Two.

The wind down Huntington Avenue is cold.

It is the Sunday before Thanksgiving, 2001.

The two of us emerge from an art-supply store and climb a set of concrete steps to street level. We both are carrying bags of loot.

"Thanks for treating me," Jane says.

"This way, the money is a birthday gift for both of us."

"Sentimental softie."

We do not look all that different from how we did in high school. Jane wears black corduroy slacks instead of jean shorts. Beneath my skirt, I am sporting a pair of leggings which have faded in the wash to an institutional green. The shirt under my jacket is mauve instead of rust-orange.

Jane sets down her shopping bag and rummages through her various pockets, eventually retrieving a folded bus schedule.

"Now, lessee, we're at Mass Ave and Huntington, so you can either ride the E train in and take the Red Line back out, or you can catch the #1 bus north and T it from there."

"Mmm."

"No clue which might be faster…" She flips the schedule over, twice. Then she looks up and tries to catch my eye.

"Brain gears a-spinnin'? Daria?"

My aunt Amy had come to visit the weekend before, waving her gold card and insisting that she buy me something fancy. "It's our patriotic duty to show our allegiance to capitalist self-indulgence." We settled on a pair of speakers and a receiver amp to drive them. Somehow the test of my new sound system grew into an actual party in my room.

I speak up at last. "Did you… Did you enjoy my birthday party?"

"Sure. Good times, good company."

"What did you think of… of my friend Cendrine?"

"Her? Seems like a nice kid. Anyone whose job is sticking electrodes into finch brains is OK in my book."

I bite my lip.

"Daria? What's the matter? You don't think you need my approval to make new friends, do you?"

"There was a time when I acted like you needed my approval to do just that," I say, recognizing that I am steering away from the point.

Jane shrugs and picks up her loot bag. "Yeah, you were clingy with a capital _B._ It's almost like you'd never had a friend before and were terrified of losing the one person who made life tolerable."

There is a bit of a joke in her tone, but not much: what she says is basically true. The touch of humor is there, I realize, to make it possible to say aloud a bare fact that still hurts us both from time to time.

"Yeah," I say.

"Daria, seriously, is something wrong?"

"I promised that I… It's Cendrine. She likes you."

"Can't fault her taste. Wait, you mean, `like' as in—"

" _Like_ like." I sound like Quinn. "She asked me if you—"

If you were at all into girls, and I told her I wasn't actually sure, and she started to tear up and I promised—

The words fail to take shape in my throat as I see you squeeze your eyes shut and sway on your feet.

"Jane, I—"

The #1 bus comes rumbling up Mass Ave and squeals to a stop across the street from us. People get off. Other people get on.

"God damn you, Alison," Jane says.

The light changes, and the bus moves forward.

We walk in silence down into the subway where the E train occasionally runs. On this Sunday midmorning, the platform is empty except for the two of us.

Jane sits at a bench and stares into the tile wall opposite, into the distance, into the past.

"I hated her so much," she says at last. "A kind of hate I hardly knew I had in me. I had thought she was… the woman on my side. A friend. Someone I could… could relate with as an artist. On a creative level. And then she… she hit on me. I was… shocked, at first. And then I went back to my cabin and I… I couldn't… I couldn't prove her wrong. You know? It was like I felt I should be able to reject the idea out of hand, but I couldn't. I knew I… I knew that the whole thing couldn't have cut me so deep if I were… If I weren't…" Her voice gives out.

I stand before her. My bag bumps my knee, gently.

"And then I found out she was banging that Dotson asshole," Jane says. "I felt used. Cheap. This meant so much to me and had me so confused, and to her it was nothing at all. A spot of sportfucking in between tea and supper. I was furious. And all that anger, it… it washed out the confusion. Of course I was straight, I told myself. She was just a…"

Jane crumples forward.

"Jane Lane. You're my best and oldest friend," I tell her. "Whether you're gay or bi or if one day you stop lusting for people altogether—you'll always be… the one who made my life incalculably better."

Jane rubs her eyes. "How did… you know?"

I sit on the bench beside her.

"I didn't. I told Cendrine that you had only dated guys, but that I had seen… That night last summer, when Jodie Landon dozed off with her head in your lap. I came back from the kitchen with chips for everybody, and the way you…"

One hand frozen above Jodie's hair, aching to move down and brush across it. Jane's features a mix of terror and longing.

"She was very pretty that night," Jane says. She claps her hands against her knees. "So."

"So."

"What do we do now?"

I look her over. She is, as ever, my dearest friend. It begins to sink in for me that life is arrayed against her in ways that I had never had to consider. The law of the land, the conventions of song and story—these are her enemies.

And that makes them my enemies, too.

"Daria, are you sure this… this won't change anything between us?"

"You mean, more than if you found a guy worth keeping for a while?"

"I just… dammit, Daria. You know what I mean."

"Am I hurt that I wasn't the one to awake these strange urges within you?"

Jane laughs without much merriment.

"Oh, hell," I say. "Near as I can tell, to the extent I get hormonal over anyone, it's over guys. Cendrine came out to me months ago, and it never really mattered. I mean, I haven't been wishing she was into me to make myself feel prettier." I pause, not sure whether I should voice the thought that hangs over me.

Jane asks me, "And she gets your stamp of approval?"

"Sure."

I hear the repeating bells of the approaching train.

"Daria, I… I don't want to be alone today. Can I come with you? I'll just, maybe, hang out in your room, try to do some sketches?"

"Of course."

We board the train. It is mostly empty. We take seats side-by-side.

I reach down into my loot bag and withdraw one of the posh hardback notebooks I had treated myself to. I open to the first page, uncap a pen and write:

_I so dearly want you to be happy, my friend. Maybe I don't have it in me to crave you on a physical level. But my luck in that department has been pretty bad, generally, so perhaps it's all for the best that I can't be in that part of your life. If she can make you feel beautiful, I will be delighted, because I love you._

Jane reads this. She smiles, borrows my pen and writes beneath my words:

_I love you too, Morgendorffer._

_Do you have her number?_


	8. Chapter 8

**Notes for the Chapter:**

>  **Fair warning:** I got the Granada TV _Sherlock Holmes_ series for Christmas and have been watching a lot of that lately.

Daria noticed herself climbing a rope up towards a treehouse.

"This is odd," she said. "I shouldn't have nearly the upper-body strength to be doing this so easily." She took a good look at the knotted hemp rope. 

Daria tried to work her memory backwards, to see if it offered any clues about her current situation. She recalled the fracas in the hotel lobby, and then Tom and Saavik were looking at her as though she were unwell, and she was telling them that she was just tired. She remembered thinking that she could pass off any odd behavior as due to her recent discovery of her own apparent bisexuality. Which sounded plausible enough. And so she had begged off, pleading the ineffectuality of caffeine, to hide in the room where she had awoken from her dream—

It had been only a dream, but that meant nothing at all.

She had found her notebook, and she had committed the sin of memoir. Then she had stared at the small, sharp silver pendant that had lain between her and her friend when they woke, shortly before becoming lovers.

She had stared long at the pendant, and now she was dreaming again.

She stretched out her arms and leaned away from the rope, her Post-Docs firmly planted against a knot.

The tree was a thousand-year oak, planted on a ravelin built of earth and brick in the wide moat of the Lord Shaper's castle.

"That settles that, then."

Daria lifted one foot off the knot. Then she lifted her other foot off the knot. Her body floated about the pivot point of her shoulders, until she was perpendicular to the rope.

"That worked according to plan," she monotoned.

Now horizontal, she ascended the rest of the way hand-over-hand until she reached the treehouse.

Halloween greeted her at the entrance. "Good! You're just in time to meet our client." She hefted Daria inside and with a flourish indicated the man who was seated on one of the room's three chairs. "The most honorable Earl of Sorrowshill, hereditary Constable of Aurelia Minor. Constable, my assistant."

"Charmed," he said. He was a portly, ruddy, fresh-faced man of middle years.

"Likewise," Daria responded.

Halloween explained, "The Earl is here to deliver certain pieces of evidence concerning the burglary of the royal crypt, of which I informed you earlier."

"The theft of a royal skull," Daria recalled. "Why would anyone do such a thing?"

The Earl opened his valise and removed a folder, tied with twine and sealed with red wax. "Sympathetic magic's my guess. I brought the argentographs which you requested." With a nod, Halloween took the folder and broke the seal. He continued. "This has been a ghastly business. The general folk of my city are uneasy. If the remains of our spiritual and temporal leaders are no longer inviolate, it is as though our history itself has been stolen from us, turned against us. It is a very bad state of affairs. I have assumed responsibility for the investigation personally."

Hallowen was spreading the documents across her table. "That is indeed fortunate."

_—Jeremy Brett himself couldn't have snarked that better._

"Well, do you see anything?" The Earl rose and stood beside the holiday, peering over her shoulder. Halloween produced a loupe and examined the black-and-white images through it.

Daria walked to the detective's other side and studied the pictures herself. They were snapshots of the mausoleum. Wreaths had been torn down, ossuaries broken open, bones dashed to the floor.

"This liquid," said Halloween, "it is spilled sacremental wine?"

The Earl grunted an affirmation. "You'll notice that it splashed on top of these bones, but beneath these others. Clearly, this skeleton was raided first. And it is the only one with a skull missing."

"Meaning," Daria hazarded, "that the thieves went for that body first, found what they came for and made the rest of the mess as a distraction?"

He said, "That was essentially my supposition. Unfortunately, with so many of the inscriptions damaged, we cannot say exactly whose remains were savaged."

"Clumsy," muttered Halloween.

"Beg pardon?" he inquired.

"The locks were popped so deftly," she said, straightening, "and the wards bypassed with such ease. Why then the clumsy, rather obvious attempt at a diversion?"

Daria suggested, "Maybe that part was just an afterthought."

"Even if it were," said Halloween, "why not carry off an extra skull or two? This was at least a two-person job—that is, two at the crypt, with a probable getaway driver nearby." Halloween picked up two of the snapshots and held them before her at arm's length. "Tell me, my good Sorrowshill, what of the wards on the perimeter? Should not they have signaled when royal bones were most rudely  
carried off?"

"You've got us there," he said. "My opinion is that the mage who placed those wards needs a good corrective talking-to."

"And now you have fairly leaped over the solution." Halloween flipped the pictures she held so that he and Daria could see them. "Apart from the headlessness of it, does this skeleton strike you as remarkable in any way?"

"It's dead," said the Earl of Sorrowshill. "Been that way a long time."

"You see nothing peculiar about it—and you deduce nothing from that?" Halloween's eyes gleamed at his puzzlement. "The royal family of Aurelia Minor is quite inbred. Now, don't pretend that their emphasis on blood purity is not common knowledge. Less well known, yet obvious enough from their daily activities and the accoutrements buried with even the young ones, is that one of the maladies concentrated by this practice is a fragility of the skeletal structure, a hereditary osteogenesis disorder. Look at this debris, here: a pelvic bone, shattered to near powder by a brief fall. And this poor princeling, with barely-healed fractures in femur, phalanges and clavicle. Meanwhile, the fellow whose skull was taken shows no such pathologies." Halloween returned the pictures to the spread on the table. "The man whose mortal remains were violated was not of royal blood. _That_ is why the wards did not detect the thieves slipping away."

The Earl did not like this. "But then what did they need his remains _for_? And what was he doing interred in the royal tomb?"

"Find out who could have been occupying a prince's resting place, and you will be closer to an answer," Halloween told him. "Good afternoon, Constable, and happy hunting."

* * *

Halloween was dropping sugar cubes into her tea. "What do you think?" she asked Daria.

A sip, and then Daria replied. "I think that if there's always this much tea drinking involved, making a deal with the Dream King will totally be worth it."

"History records," said Halloween, "that tea was first brought to Russia by their envoy to Mongolia. The Khan gifted him a load of leaves, much to the envoy's consternation. `Try it,' he was told, in essence, `and then you'll see.'"

"The beverage of Mongol diplomacy."

The detective curled her feet under herself and sat, cup in one hand, chocolate in the other. "And what did you think of our guest, the good Earl Sorrowshill?"

Daria paused. "Bit stuffy," she said at last.

"For an Aurelian lord, he's positively laid back. An aristocrat, educated well enough according to the fashion of his class. And therefore blind to the most important aspects of the case. Yet he is, for our sins, the best we have in that city."

"Maybe this is something I should have picked up before now, but where _is_ Aurelia Minor? A cavern halfway to the center of the Earth?"

"Closer than that, by some ways of reckoning. An ancestor of mine maintained," Halloween said, "that for a detective, it matters not one jot whether the Earth circles the Sun or vice versa. For him, with the benefit of authorial contrivance, perhaps so. But you and I, well. You recall the Platonic image of the universe?"

"The Earth in the middle, with the Sun, the Moon and a few planets going round it on crystal spheres."

"Quite. And what was the meaning, in medieval Europe, of the Earth being central?"

"That we lived in the imperfect realm, the garbage disposal toward which all the flawed and noncelestial matter fell, while the perfect heavens circled above."

"A useful little fable, wouldn't you say? Useful—for the inhabitants of the outer regions. Nothing kept the terrestrials quite in their place like the idea their `betters' inhabited crystal spheres. Whereas you yourself have witnessed the limitations of the Jovian constabulary."

"Jovian?!"

"A grand canvas for rather petty passions," Halloween mused.

Daria had frozen with a sugar cookie halfway to her mouth.

"I think… I'm having a spell of vertigo. Or something like that."

Halloween rose, crossed the room and lightly touched Daria's shoulder.

"I was talking on my phone just a few hours ago," Daria said. "To my friend. Trent, Jane's brother. My phone works just like before. Electromagnetism and chemistry and… They're all just as good as ever. But somehow there's this whole everything else, at right angles to all the things I know. And it's not `another way of knowing,' in a religious sense, in the way that people mean when they want to be warm and fuzzy. It's not a warm and fuzzy truth. It's old and vast and indifferent. It's all too much."

Daria found herself trembling.

"It's all too much," she repeated. "Maybe the last writer who made a deal—maybe Will Shakespeare had it easier. An age where the world wasn't so filled in, and this kind of weird still had a place to fit. I don't know. Maybe I've made a horrible mistake choosing all this."

"Your learning is as good as it ever was," Halloween said, quietly, insistently. "Better even than you realize. These other realms have been interchanging with your Earth for a very long time. Much of their substance is drawn from the world you know. You have studied history and mythology since childhood. Those will stand you in good stead when we deal with Aurelia Minor, Arimaspia, the Court of Faerie and all the rest."

Halloween offered Daria a chocolate truffle.

"Have others…" Daria tried to find the right words. "Have others survived this? What I've got myself into?"

"Yes. That is, multiple humans alive today have been drawn—stumbled or been drawn—into otherly affairs. They live on. Even live well." She sighed. "I had expected this might become a concern, but I did not plan adequately in advance. Please forgive me. I can, if you wish, arrange for you to meet some of them, though it may take a little while to bring about."

"All right. I like that idea. I think. Yes. Yes."

"Very well. In the meantime, if you wish to speak with me, hold the sigil I gave you and call upon me. And—I see you are now concerned with what would happen if your friends were brought into this as well."

"How could you tell?"

" _Is_ that something you want?"

"I don't know," Daria said. "I don't know."

"Would sharing the burden diminish it," Halloween said, contemplatively, "or would you merely inflict upon them the knowledge you struggle with? So difficult to tell."

"Yeah," Daria mumbled.

"Perhaps what you should ask yourself is this: If it had been your friend who had changed their life in the Dreaming, would _you_ want them to share that with you?"


	9. Chapter 9

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Our Heroine has, over the past twenty-four hours, made a deal with the Dream King and found a person who finds her attractive. The former is hard to fathom, but she finds the latter absolutely incomprehensible.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> There's a brief bit of heavy stuff in this chapter, when Daria talks about sexual harassment in academia.

_Dear Daria's Diary,_

_Daria speaking._

_When I was younger, I heard quite a few people say that love is complicated, but I didn't see how. My sister was pretty, and she leveraged that for attention and favors. Simple enough. I fell prey to a crush on my best friend's brother. Awkward, but still simple. Then that best friend of mine met a guy, dated him, got tired of dating him and had to hear from me that I kissed him before they had technically split up. Slightly more complicated. Then that best friend of mine came out to me as bisexual, with the definite undertone that her not being attracted to me had been her strongest argument to herself that she was straight. Then came the moods she sank into after her girlfriend left, and the arguments, and the reconciliations, and the self-destructive flings with the Bodley kids and their serious speed habits. It was roughly at this point that I finally began to think that the real complexity was within us all along._

_Somewhere in there, amid all the Major Episodes, I realized that I wasn't wired to lust for anybody without finding them emotionally appealing first. I had started to suspect this in college, yet my blushing infatuation with Trent Lane appeared to argue against it. It was not until he met Qiana that I realized the truth: He was not the exception to the rule, but the first example of it. I had had no experience with a sibling bond, with trust and affection---my relationship with Quinn was more a case of Mutually Assured Destruction, with brief intervals of détente. Jane was the first true friend I ever met, and her bond with Trent was so radical to me that, where evidence of his character was concerned, it swept me away. Never since had I grown attracted to a boy so quickly, but never since had I been convinced so quickly of the soul a boy possessed._

_I discussed this newfound self-knowlege with my aunt, who told me that she herself was thoroughly asexual. "I didn't realize this about myself until I was around your age," quoth Amy. "In high school, it was easy to think that boys just weren't grown enough yet to be appealing in any way. I had to go off to college---and make my first lesbian friends, and realize I wasn't like them, either."_

_I asked, as I recall, "Didn't you tell me you wanted a pin-up of Ralph Fiennes?"_

_"I really liked him in **Quiz Show** ," she said. And then, less flippantly: "I found that it's easier to joke it off, sometimes. Daria, I've spent a long damn time dealing with people who don't get how simple it is, really. All the well-meaning friends with their 'you just need to meet the right person' routine. Straight women didn't believe me, gay women thought I was in denial. Men were a disaster every which way, but that's hardly the News at Ten, is it?"_

_And now I am wondering how to explain to her that the boy I dated in high school (yes, the one who dated that capital-R Rationalist guy in college, which ended exactly as badly as we all predicted) has found himself a positively delightful girlfriend, who happens to be trans, and who also happens to have seduced me thoroughly and effectively. Out of politeness, I should refrain from saying how she displayed a practised level of skill in the carnal arts. Perhaps that can be taken as read. To judge from the sounds, she has plugged herself into the video-game system of the hotel suite where this all went down---I mean, where this all **happened** \---and is currently firing a very big gun at a truly immoderately sized mechanical spider._

"Cockknocker!" Saavik swore.

Daria padded up beside her, notebook in one hand, disposable fountain pen in the other. "Trouble in paradise?"

"Oh, heyyo. One second---you mangy shite-huffer!" On the HD wall screen, her grenade volley went wide, missing the mecha-spider and blasting the wall of an abandoned industrial building. But, Daria figured, there seemed to be plenty more abandoned industrial buildings where that one came from. "You napped through Jane leaving. She's taking the last shift at the booth downstairs. Tom is---eat my photons, fuck-eyes!---Tom had to sort out another work crisis on the phone and then he went to go crash. Oh come on, that was an easy shot!" The spider was spitting streams of incandescent plasma toward the space marines who were hunkering behind an overturned school bus. "The combat AI for my squad guys is soggy as fuck," Saavik explained to Daria. "Wait just one moment---hey, jizzgibbon, think fast!"

An EMP bomb exploded underneath the spider. It wobbled for a few steps and then went down hard, space marines swarming over it.

"Nicely done," Daria said. "Planning to move to Scotland?"

The game transitioned to the cutscene that introduced the next deserted industrial zone. Saavik tossed her controller aside. "What's up?"

"You want to go for a vacation from this stay-cation? I kind of feel like getting out of this hotel for a while."

* * *

They rode the subterranean bus to the proper subway at South Station, then took the Red Line into the middle of town. In between DTX and Park Street, the train lurched to a stop, suddenly enough to make the strap-hangers stumble. The lights flickered.

A woman in a Celtics jacket, down at the far end of the train car, spoke up: "Boston Twenty-Twenty-Four!" she called out, and the people around her chuckled.

Saavik smiled a little and pulled out her phone. "No news of a train on fire," she told Daria.

"Any news at all?"

"Well, it's not turkey season, so most of the local chatter is about wondering what the helicopters are doing."

Saavik kept scrolling with the phone-light in her eyes, and after half a minute of the train not moving, Daria asked, "Are you that Millennial or am I just that boring?"

"Just catching up on the drama in the NPN Junction group," Saavik said. "They're a crew of locals who are pushing for a new T station for Neponset and Port Norfolk. Y'know, it's kind of amazing how much personality friction a club can generate, even if they only meet, like, bimonthly."

"You mean, twice every month, or?"

"Once every two months, like _bisexual_ is once every two genders."

"Too soon," Daria grumbled. And the train started moving again.

Saavik said, "I vote we get off at the soonest opportunity."

"Do you do 'phrasing'?"

* * *

Boston Common was still and austere. They bought a bag of roasted chestnuts from a vendor in a fleece overcoat and hijab. Passing the warm paper sack back and forth, they walked without speaking away from the T station, into the interior. The edges of the path through the parkland were muddy and sodden with snow-melt. A pair of determined joggers passed them going the other way, but otherwise, Daria figured, it was about as quiet, and they were about as alone, as could be in the heart of a city.

_\---When brambly trees I see barren of leaf---_

"You look," Saavik offered, "kind of a long way away?"

"Sorry," Daria said. "But if it's any consolation, I'm sure I improve with distance."

"Pssssh." Saavik was smiling.

"It's just that..." Daria turned to look back the way they came. "You see the Plunkin Pastries across the street from the T station?"

"Not to be confused with the Plunkin on the other corner of the park, or the one inside the station."

"That one back there is where Jane and I got coffee and hash browns, one bitter-ass cold morning just before dawn, after we'd been up all night tripping balls on blotter acid we'd bought from a guy with a connection in, he assured us, the Yakuza."

"Holy shit, no way!"

"And this kind of feels like that morning after. I'm bombed out, waiting for sleep deprivation to catch up with me, I have no context for most of the things that have happened to me in the past twelve hours, and I don't know who to talk to about any of it, except maybe the person who is right beside me."

"That's... I mean, it wrapped all the way around to sweet again maybe?"

Daria handed her the bag of chestnuts.

"So," Daria said, "would this morning be a... thing... you would ever do again?"

"I figured you for a relationship girl. Hey, I'm a relationship girl too. And I'm willing to see where this goes, if you want to give it a shot."

"Um. Thank you?"

"And on the subject, can I ask you a question?"

_\---OK, Daria, you've got the opportunity for it. Go all in._

"Fine," she deadpanned, "but only because you brought me to orgasm twice today."

Saavik spluttered, tossed her head back and scanned the sky with an expression of wonderment at just what she was getting herself into. Recollecting herself, she looked down again to Daria. "I know this whole weekend was a business thing for Jane, what with them selling those old props and whatnot. And Tom has been handling work stuff, because he's not one to switch off. But all I know about what you do is that phone call about the job that I guess you left behind."

"You're wondering how the woman with the Bromwell PhD ended up an adjunct instructor at Great Prairie State?"

"I mean, I... You sound like you're, well, kind of used to people thinking you're a wash-out?"

"I believe the technical term is _fuckup._ "

"Hey, now, none of that! I was just thinking, I mean, I know you moved here just recently. I guess I wanted to know---if you want to talk about it---what you left behind?"

"My fiancé cheated on me," Daria said.

"Shit."

"But the reason I was there in the first place... This is kind of heavy. You sure you want to hear it?"

"If you can dish it out, I can take it."

"I had a friend at Bromwell," Daria began. "She had started graduate school in philosophy the year before I came to the literature department to do Comparative Media Studies. She was sexually harassed by her thesis advisor. I convinced her to report it. In fact, I convinced her to wear a wire at a conference, against the eventuality that he would make a move upon her, which he did."

Saavik's fingers went to her lips. Daria continued: "The ensuing drama engulfed the department. It snowballed into a full Title IX investigation."

Saavik said, "Hey, I think I read about that! Some friend of mine shared it on the social medias. Wasn't there some report that got leaked? It said that the faculty derailed every discussion of new policies by, like, debating footnotes and hypotheticals? I remember because I thought, hey, that sounds like every nerdy fan club I've ever been part of."

"More or less," Daria affirmed.

"I bet all that made you woman of the hour around Bromwell."

"I got the usual reward for sticking with my principles."

"Let me guess: _Burn Goody Morgendorffer!_ "

"Blackballed by the blueballed. Since I wasn't in their department, there was only so much they could do to me... until I graduated and had to start looking for postdoc positions. I had what my advisor thought was a sure thing at Crestmore, but I got shot down at the last minute. An old friend of mine is on their alumni board and got me the inside scoop. Basically, a dickhead on Bromwell's philosophy faculty sprayed all over them. And the job with Bromwell University Press, well, that was doomed. Right about this time, my boyfriend got a tenure-track position at Lloyd."

"So you moved with him."

"We hadn't even been living together. Well, not past the 'one drawer of stuff at the other person's place' stage. But..."

"The suckiness in your work life made the choice for you?"

"It sure lubricated the path." Daria sighed. "I don't know, I don't know. It was the worst my career had ever been going, and the best my love life had... I mean..."

"What happened to your friend?"

"She hates me." Daria tried to shrug.

"Did she blame you?"

"Not without reason," Daria said. "It was my advice. And I wasn't there to support her as much as I could have been, during the worst of it, because I had... I had to take care of another friend who was sick."

\--- _She can probably guess who._

"Last question," Saavik said. "Do you like kisses in public?"

Daria figured the sensation in her face was a blush. "Not as such, no."

"Then I'll have to save the one I've got brewing until we get back to the hotel."

* * *

\--- _a thousand hot lanterns in swarm motion up and down the terraces_

\--- _the storm frozen over the sea_

\--- _the sea, the storm and all night's dreaming wait for me_

* * *

Even in her heavy Post-Docs, Daria fairly skittered as she followed half a step behind Saavik, across the hotel lobby and into the hotel lobby. Their fingers collided as they both jabbed the up button. "We wait until we get to the room," Saavik said.

"Of course," Daria confirmed.

The elevator chimed softly, and the doors slid open.

"Oh, it's empty," Saavik said, stepping inside. Daria followed.

Saavik did not quite wait until the doors were closed before tilting Daria's chin up and wrapping an arm around her back to pull her into an embrace.

"Mmmggr," Daria tried to say.

"Huh?" Saavik leaned her head back, maybe a couple centimeters.

"Floor," Daria said.

"Oh. Right."

The elevator began to rise.

\--- _We stop if it stops---we'll stop when it stops---so simple as a hand on my back beneath my hair, why is that so---we stop if it stops---oh, it's chiming---are we there---let's not stop---_

The doors had opened.

Jane Lane was tipping a tub of blueberry yogurt towards her lips.

Saavik and Daria stumbled apart. Their hands, Daria noted, were still clasped.

"Huh," said Jane.

The elevator chimed again, and the doors started to close. Daria reached across the empty space, her right hand still grasping Saavik's left.

The elevator doors closed upon Daria's fingertips.

"The Hell?" she said.

A recorded voice came from the tiny speaker grill just above the grid of numbered buttons. "Please pardon the inconvenience. There has been a malfunction."

"That malfunction is my hand," Daria said.

Saavik started to giggle. Daria let her fall back as she stepped forward to try kicking the door, on the general logic of making machines work by proper boot application.

The toe of her Post-Doc connected with the metal plate, and the two halves of the door opened just enough to let her pull out her fingers---reddened, but mostly fine, it seemed---and then they closed again.

"Please pardon the inconvenience," the recording said, and Daria's stomach rose as the elevator descended.

It dropped all the way back to the ground floor, opened to reveal an empty hall, closed itself and ascended once more.

Jane had not moved, but now, Tom was standing beside her. They looked in at Daria and Saavik, leaning on each other, giggling helplessly.

Jane turned to Tom.

"Chicks," he said.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> An elevator totally did that to me once, in Raleigh, North Carolina.


	10. Chapter 10

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> What happened when Daria and the Dream King met on his castle roof?

Everything moved too fast.

Once they reached the suite, Giulio was presenting Aisha with a plush toy TARDIS that made real _vwoorp vwoorp_ noises when you pushed the button, and Aisha was all full of giggles and leaping into his arms, and then they and Jane were going downstairs to break down the booth, and Jane was gone and Tom was in and out and saying that a big thing needed writing by tomorrow, and Jane was gone and Tom was planting himself at a table and scribbling into a notebook. And Saavik was curling her arm around Daria's shoulders and nuzzling just a little into the top of Daria's head.

Keeping her voice low, Saavik asked, "You okay?"

"Fine. Just... having one of those moments where the brightness and contrast knobs are all turned up."

"Listen," Saavik said, and only the two of them could hear. "Would it be all right with you if I stayed with Tom tonight?"

"Why wouldn't it be?"

"I don't want you to feel like I'm leaving you in the cold. But he has to leave for two weeks in Maryland tomorrow, and..."

"I get it. We'll figure things out. I didn't learn spreadsheets for nothing."

Saavik gently crooked a finger under Daria's chin. "Darling girl," she said.

And then Tom was fielding a phone call from the New Town office, and Saavik was getting back into detonating her giant mechanical spiders, and the two of them were starting to chat about ordering in room service for dinner, and Daria found her own notebook.

* * *

_The storm is frozen over the sea._

_That is the first sight to sweep over me as we step onto the roof. The Lord Shaper is at my side, and his raven is now on my shoulder._

_Upwelling cliffs of cumulonimbus, as large as—as—themselves, clouds the size of those that drove my ancestors to worship thunder and lightning and the invisible power of the all-scouring wind. The glow within them is held steady, fixed in abeyance. The wall awaits over the sea, the sea that is, in simple truth, dark like wine tonight._

_It had been the small hours of the morning when my friend and I walked out of the hotel where I did not belong. I spoke with the Dream King on a golden afternoon. Now, a lungful of library air still caught in my chest, it is midnight. I know it is, and I know it has to be._

_The tower beneath us is vertiginously tall, and the castle of the Lord Shaper cascades down from it in a fugue of architectural styles. The spires of a height with us, steel banners forming a neon-lit cradle between them—those are a cherished memory, Potsdamer Platz on a summertime night. Walkways and arcades beneath them are the Magnificent Mile in autumn and Vieux Lyon in the first week of spring. All up and down, along stairways and through colonnades, reflected in fountain pools and interrupted by trees, lanterns are in motion, paper shells the colors of pumpkins and tangerines and blood oranges._

_"Ulla, ulla," sings the woman on the wall. She crouches on a lowered segment of the crenellation, one hand on her knee, the other pinching a bar of chocolate. Then she rises and walks towards me. Her feet are bare against the rough stone. "Are you ready?"_

_This woman has within her the tripods and their smoke and red vines that choke cities. But she is also the sardonic voice which promises that one day, and right quickly will it come, the tripods will move again, and not a Martian in 'em—not a Martian in 'em! She was born of all the things that came out of the forest into the firelight, of our fears of death and our mistrust of those who had a little power to keep death at bay, of women who with roots and leaves could cure a few ailments and who for that gift burned at the stake. In her flow the centuries through which children have heard monsters, and during which we have told children stories where the monsters can be slain. She is the generations that have, by rituals only half understood, tried to make a place for the inhuman, to bring the forest-things into the daylight scheme of reckoning._

_"I'm terrified," I tell her._

_"Liar," she replies, without malice._

_The Lord Shaper speaks. "I believe you appreciate the gravity of this situation, and I will respect your judgment."_

_I walk to the battlement and take hold of the stonework's edge._

_"The storm waits for me," I say. Between the castle and the shore is a wild land, ancient stands of pine and fir cut through by gorges and ravines. I turn back and look past my companions to the spires and weathervanes and elevated causeways of the castle itself. A pair of serpentine skeletons have wrapped themselves around a tower near ours. The caduceus they make is slowly unwinding. One of the things, all skull and spine and ribs, disconnects itself from that tower and vaults through the air, turning, circling our ramparts with no need of support. It pauses and regards me with its empty eye sockets the size of my head, then swivels its great fossil cranium and undulates away over the fountains and gardens._

_Walking back to the Dream King, I begin to speak. "My little sister took a statistics course in college, by happenstance, and fell in love with it. She made it the first step to a career, one that she hopes will support a family of her own soon. Jane, my first and best friend, is living in the middle of her greatest desires. She has built a place for herself where she can devote her life to her art. Tom came back from losing his father and turned his resources towards doing good in the world. And Saavik, the woman who he loves and perhaps my newest friend, started with far fewer advantages than I, but still bent her very chromosomes to her will."_

_There is a dagger in my boot, because that is where daggers are kept._

_"And as for me," I continue, "I've let every chance either slip away from me or get bungled in the execution. I stuck to my principles, and my reward was losing my career. I rearranged my life around my love, and my lover betrayed me."_

_I slide off the white glove from my left hand. With my right, I remove the dagger from my boot._

_"Hell is empty," I tell them, "and all my devils are here."_

_I close my bare fist around the blade. Blood runs down its edges to drip on the flagstones. I uncurl my fingers. The incision is open across my palm._

_With my other hand, the one gauntleted by Jane's creativity and skill and unique madness, I offer the knife, hilt-first, to Halloween._

_She nods and takes it from me._

_"The occasion does require a certain level of ceremony, don't you think?" With a swift motion, she scores her own left palm. And then she passes the knife, hilt-first, to the Dream King._

_The wind rises. My coat is blown back from my legs._

_Daniel, Dream of the Endless, opens a line across his palm. The liquid that begins to flow is black, but in this light, so is my own blood, and the ichor of Halloween._

_I clasp my wounded hand with hers._

_The pain comes now, as we mingle. It tenses the muscles throughout my body. I am rooted where I stand. I find myself leaning into the pain, grasping harder._

_The storm is in motion now. Lightning courses into the evergreens of the Dreaming. Halos and coronas form around the weathervanes atop the castle spires, flickering through every shade of blue and green._

_Daniel holds his fist above the union where Halloween and I are joined. A droplet falls onto my skin and slides over hers. A gust of air lashes my face._

_The coronal glow has arrived at the spikes atop the tower battlements. Its pulsation compasses us._

_The raven Matthew bites the fabric at my shoulder for purchase against the continual wind, which now bends to circle our conjunction, whipping my hair to my right and hers to my left._

_Daniel's hand comes to rest upon ours._

_My gauntlet begins to glow. I lift my arm and turn it over, watching the halo build, watching it ripple up to my fingertips._

_I curl the fingers Jane has given me into a fist._

_"Lead on," I scream, and my voice is the whirlwind. "Lead on—"_


	11. Chapter 11

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> The Aletheia convention is winding down, and Our Heroine seeks stable ground.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> There's a mention of blood and medical stuff near the end, but nothing serious.

A cloud blew out of the way, and the room filled with the sunset.

Jane was cross-legged on the bed, a ledger and several small stacks of paper scattered about her. She had plugged her old Encom music pod into the room's stereo and set it to a playlist that Daria recognized from ages before, a stack of film scores that Daria had ripped from CD in the Raft music library. They were in the midst of _Koyaanisqatsi,_ with "Pruitt-Igoe" dimming out and "The Grid" fading in.

Daria reached a little behind herself and rapped her knuckles against the door jamb. "Mind if I join you?"

Jane smiled and started gathering several of her piles into a larger, consolidated heap, clearing a space for Daria to sit.

She settled herself beside Jane and nudged backward to lean against one of the hotel's superfluity of pillows. She debated starting off with _I made things weird, didn't I_ , but changed her mind and said, in the level voice that came naturally to her, "I know how you felt now."

Jane quirked an eyebrow.

Daria tugged on the chain that ran into her pocket and pulled out the watch. She flipped it open. _NEVER FORGET._ "Not being into you," she told Jane, "was my best evidence that I was straight."

Jane chuckled, a deep and honest sound, and it was beautiful.

"You're a weird one," she told Daria, "but the best kind of weird."

"You were my refuge," Daria said, with more steadiness than she had anticipated. "Wanting people turned out badly one time after another. You're the one I never wanted, and who never wanted me. And that meant I could trust you with ... with my heart."

Jane blinked, her eyes shiny. "Two things get you like this," she said, her voice rough at the edges. "LSD and Tom Sloane's girlfriend."

"I don't know what to do about that."

"She likes _Ghost in the Shell,_ " Jane offered. "And Infected Mushroom and century eggs and pictures of animals with their mouths wide open captioned with the letter A."

"Especially birds," Tom said from the doorway.

"Well hello," Jane said. She began further consolidation of her note-piles.

As Tom curled himself up into the space on the other side of Jane, Daria asked without preamble, "Do you think she and I can make it work together?"

He replied, "Admitting you want to make it work is a good first step, and both of you are there already."

Jane surveyed Tom and clicked her pen a couple times. "You're displaying awfully little of the green monster about this."

"If it were anybody else," Tom said with a little laugh and a little sigh, "I'd be worried, on some level. But this is ... too strange not to be right. So, screw it: Everybody is bisexual and nothing hurts."

Daria said, "I don't even have much experience doing this well when it's just a pair of us."

"Well," said Tom, "maybe you have more relevant poly experience to go on than most."

"Huh?"

"You have dated since 1997, I'm pretty sure."

"I guess I can take _your_ word for it."

"Meaning that you've dated after you met her," he gestured in a line from Daria to Jane, "and apart from the detail of not wanting to sleep with each other, aren't the two of you in love?"

Jane gaped like a fish, snapped her mouth shut and then let her jaw drop again. "That's..." she began.

"...not wrong," Daria finished.

* * *

The flatscreen in the center room of the suite was tuned to the fireplace channel, and Aisha had set the sound system to a nostalgia remix station. At the moment, she, Jane and Giulio were folding sheets of origami into angular fiddlybits that, if the instructions did not lie, would assemble into a dodecahedron. Daria recognized the incoming track as, of all things, a recording of a DJ Qiana live show.

_"Mathman, your mission is to eat only numbers that are highly caffeinated. And beware the Millennial Mr. Glitch: He will eat **you** if you are wrong."_

_"Yahr, mm, grrr. Mathman's just an avocado in a hat."_

They had ordered up room service, which was about as decadent as Daria could imagine being, if not a smidge beyond that. All that remained was the slice of cheesecake that Daria was appreciating, one forkful at a time, and the last of the fried-pickle basket, which Saavik cradled in her arms and retrieved morsels from as she cuddled into Tom on the sofa.

When Daria had first known Tom --- that is, when he was dating Jane --- she had seen him as ostentatiously cheap. This was long before the Internet had taught kids everywhere the meaning of words like "performative rebellion", but they fit the way he had appeared to be. Later, she had found a genuine element in the performance. It became clear when he had replied to some chastisement from his father with a dry, "I didn't think you had raised me to buy garbage just because it was expensive." She learned that Tom had been trying --- in a clumsy, half-informed way, because they were all teenagers --- to find an honest core in his life, or to make one if he couldn't find it. He tried to shape a context in his own conscience for his summer shifts at Grace, Sloane and Page, approaching them as "learning the family trade" instead of nepotistic dealing. When he took objection to his family, he grounded himself in the principles they had claimed, in their minds honestly, to raise him with. It made most of what he said unanswerable save by fiat, and it created a long string of little coldnesses between Tom and his father that never quite dissipated.

He had been a boy who came across like a rich kid slumming, but he had grown into a man at ease with the resources at his fingers because he trusted the purpose he had found to direct them.

She remembered how uncomfortable he had been in the quiet moments between actions, when they had dined at his parents' club or pulled his car in to park beside his father's. Tom was comfortable now, renting a hotel suite for his friends, leaning back along a sofa with his girlfriend snuggled into his arms.

"I'll be honest," Aisha said, "that's been bothering me for years." She, Giulio and Jane sat on the floor in front of the flatscreen. "There's Tony Stark, right," Aisha continued, "and he's built this device that could solve the world's energy problems, but what does he do with it? Fly around and punch people really hard? I mean, dude, even if the arc reactor tech is too dangerous to build around the world --- like, it could be stolen and weaponized --- you've still basically solved the problem of getting to Earth orbit, which means you've solved the problem of limitless solar power."

Tom said, "But you'd still have to beam the power back down to Earth."

"It's a challenge, sure, but not one where you're up against the rocket equation." Aisha paused and stretched, rolling first one shoulder and then the other. "Tony Stark could build a wireless power transmission rig _in a cave_ with a _box of scraps!_ "

Through all this, Jane was folding her origami units and interlocking them into their places, smiling just a little. It was an honest smile, but a subdued one, not the kind of hundred-and-ten-percent joy that Jane could radiate in her louder moments.

Saavik, too, was quietly pleased, lounging in Tom's embrace, grinning with her eyes closed when he inclined to nuzzle the top of her head, which put a twinkle in his gaze.

Giulio suggested, "Why don't you show Daria the book you found her."

"Oh, right!" Aisha exclaimed. "We found you a book!" She looked about herself.

"I'll get it," Jane said, rising. She padded off in slipper-feet to the bedroom she had claimed as her own and returned with a book in her hands.

"Hardcover, even," Daria observed. "Is that---"

Jane said, "I remembered that old paperback of yours got lost somewhere along the way. We found this in the hawkers' hall yesterday."

Saavik sat up and read the cover as Jane passed the book to Daria. " _Down-Home Cyber-Pulp Baggage._ Wait, that was a book before it was a movie?"

"Hey, so was _Die Hard,_ " Tom noted.

"The book is ... stranger," Daria said, opening to the first chapter.

_And one more time for good measure. The shock reverberated from the walls of the dingy hotel room and damn near made my ears bleed...._

Daria spoke up, in a voice meant mostly for Jane. "I forgot my copy when I packed my things in Chicago. Thank you."

Aisha said, "Our other surprise was that I found crossover fanfiction where the woman that Bryce meets in the parking garage, after he caps the sheriff's son-in-law, is Melody Glass."

"Oh dear," Daria deadpanned.

"I can see that working," Giulio said.

Aisha looked over her shoulder at him. "That's what you said about  
that crossover between _Gargoyles_ and _Person of  
Interest._ "

"It had good character work!" he protested.

* * *

Just before she vanished with Tom into the master bedroom, Saavik embraced Daria one more time and gave her a peck on the lips. "You really are OK?" she whispered.

"Except for suddenly craving fried pickles," Daria told her.

She giggled and gently released Daria from her arms. "See you tomorrow."

Daria stared for a moment in the direction she had gone, and then turned to face Jane. "Do you have any more of those calm-in-a-bottle pills?"

Jane went to the bag at the foot of her bed and rummaged out the small brown prescription bottle. "So much for setting an example for the youth."

"It's not peer pressure, it's the wisdom of crowds."

She watched as Jane upended the bottle onto her palm. "Temptation. Apple. Et cetera." Daria picked one of the four pills from Jane's hand and held it loosely in a half-curled fist. Then she checked the time on her pocketwatch, figured _eh, what the Hell_ and swallowed the pill dry.

Twenty-odd minutes later, Daria was flattened out on the floor. Jane looked over the edge of the bed, her final bits of post-convention ledger work in her hands. "You OK down there? Sure you don't want to get moved somewhere a little fluffier?"

"There's still so much this carpet has to teach me." Then, without lifting her head, Daria asked, "Are you worried you were wrong about me?"

"Way I see it, you were wrong and I was right."

At this, Daria pushed herself up on her elbows. "Say again?"

"You attracted someone. A rather nice someone who I approve of. And you like them back." Jane smiled. "I was right, and you were wrong."

Daria let herself sink back onto the carpet. After a moment, her lips curved in a Mona Lisa smile.

She inhaled, slowly and deeply, and then let the air out again.

"You and I," she said, "have shared most of the things that friends can. Most of the rest of the list is things I'd rather avoid. Organ transplants. The experience of trench warfare."

"Boyfriends," Jane suggested. "Oh, crap."

"Very droll, Lane. But now I'm thinking the list is growing in ways I could never have anticipated."

"Like?"

Daria stared at the ceiling. "Coming out," she answered, softly. "We've both come out to the other as..." She paused, wondering how the word would feel in her mouth. "Bisexual."

Jane laughed a little, quietly. "You're right about that, anyway."

"Bisexual," Daria said again. "Or do you think I should go with _queer_?"

"Asking me? You're the wordsmith."

"Neither is very easy to play in Scrabble," Daria noted.

"You know," Jane said, slightly hesitantly. "You don't have to rush into buying the lapel pins. Labeling yourself. If you want to take time and see, I mean, if you don't know whether other women can..."

"I _coveted_ her," Daria said. "I went from uncertain to convinced in the space of a kiss. And even if she's the only woman who'll ever make me feel that way, considering where I was before, that kiss will always be..."

"One of the most important of your life."

_\---something nagging at me---_

Jane clicked her pen with an air of finality and moved to sit in the armchair beside the bed, where she could watch Daria without leaning. She stretched out her legs and planted her feet on top of the bedspread. "You on the way to the plasticine porters with looking-glass ties?"

_\---a little extra thing that doesn't fit, in among the nothing-at-all-fits that is my life---_

"Logic and proportion are on life support." Daria's smile grew more pronounced and turned into a giggle. She lolled sideways to look at Jane. "I miss getting high together."

Jane stared at her own slippers. "I miss when drugs weren't prescription."

"Ha! Hm hmm. Stay with me a while? Until I fall asleep?"

Jane looked up. Her eyes met Daria's. "Naturally, Morgendorffer."

* * *

The next Friday, Daria woke from a solid and undisturbed oversleeping to find two emails waiting for her on her laptop. The first was from the Special Collections department of the Archminster University library.

_That particular De Quincey manuscript was far down our digitization queue, but your puzzle excited both our senior classicist and our Borges expert. We accordingly shuffled the queue; the results are attached. It appears that your suspicion was correct, and the passage in question is indeed missing---_

The second message was from Saavik.

_Dinner tonight? I hear you're good with curry._

Jane craned her neck to peer through Daria's open door with elaborate nonchalance. "I heard an 'eep'."

Daria typed _Sure! 7:30?_ and hit the "send" button before she allowed herself time for a second thought. Then she stood and walked to her closet. She began to slide hangers back and forth, taking deliberately deep breaths. "Green with blue stripes or blue with green stripes?"

Jane looked from one sweater to the other. "Depends. Are you going on a date or deciding which wire to cut?"

Daria slumped. "I'm cooking dinner for Tom's girlfriend. So, this _could_ all blow up in my face."

"Mmm. Reminds me of my first time."

Daria's eyebrows scrunched up in a glare.

"You're nervous about this, aren't you?" Jane crossed her arms and rested her weight on one foot. "You really want to look your best for her."

"You'd think I would have learned how to feel about that kind of thing somewhere along the line. But I'm still..." She switched hangars back and forth again, judging herself in the mirror.

"You never learned how to be pretty."

"Vanity of vanities," Daria said.

"'And I commend enjoyment,'" Jane quoted, "'for man has no better thing under the sun than to eat, to drink and to be merry.'" Daria looked at her. "Ecclesiastes 8:15. I'm sure it applies to wo-man, too."

"Speaking of womanly attributes---should I try to do something with my hair?"

"Faux-hawk?"

Daria's eyes lowered. "She tied it back and braided it for me. Maybe... that's the look she likes?"

"C'mon," Jane beckoned. "I've got time before I have to go back downstairs. Let's go sit down and put on some Dethklok to soothe your nerves, and we'll see what the Lane fingers can do."

They sat on the gallery floor. Daria faced the sculpture of flowering chrome while Jane, kneeling behind her, brought order to her hair.

Jane asked, "Research going well? You hear back from those people you wrote to?"

"One of them. A Raft-dot-edu address can really open doors."

"Hmm, as I recall, it was your suave and debonair artist friend who convinced you to trade ten hits of sunshine to that tech guy to keep your account from expiring."

"I never doubted your judgment ... about that."

"Har har. So what did you hear about that thing with the seven gods? That's what you wanted for your story, right? Something in world myth where the gods of death and dreaming and madness are all part of a happy dysfunctional family."

_\---Faced with a revelation that upends everything, I go to the library. Yep, that's me._

_\---Screw it. They picked me, I do this my way._

"I had found a claim," Daria began, "that in a variant manuscript of Hesiod's _Theogony,_ Khronos and Nyx --- the personifications of Time and Night, who lived before the gods --- bore the children Olethros, Moros, Philotes, Oizys, Thanatos, Mania and Hypnos. That's Destruction, Fate, Desire, Woe, Death, Madness and ... Dream. That's just about perfect for what I wanted. But it's not the standard list from the Hesiod I read as a wee tyke, so I tried to find it. The website got it from a book, which got it from another book, which got it out of a transcript of a Borges lecture. And Borges said he read it in an unfinished translation of Hesiod by Thomas De Quincey, he of _English Opium-Eater_ fame. Only it looks like Borges made it up."

"Do you get a prize for finding that out?"

"Well, I made the day of a few academics in England, so I should be able to get a free warm beer out of the deal. But get this. The lecture where Borges said all that --- it happened in Lawndale."

"No shit."

"None."

"OK, let's up and see how you look." Jane sprang to her feet, then hoisted Daria to a standing position and led her to the bathroom mirror. "Acceptable?"

"Fuck, I don't know."

"That's my girl. Oh, hey, you mentioning Lawndale reminded me --- Tom shared me that cloud folder thingy with his old pictures. Turns out one of my old sketchbooks is on there. Must have been from when I scanned it on the Sloane's fancy scanner."

"You and me, always finding the best ideas for date night."

"Want to see? There might be blackmail material you should know about."

"Blackmail on you or on me?"

"That's the spirit. Oop, gotta go. I'll send you the link --- and make sure you cook enough so I get leftovers!"

Daria stood alone for a while, trying her braid over her left shoulder, then her right, then down her back. She returned to her laptop and checked her email for the second time that day. Saavik had written back: _Sounds perfect! I'll text you when I get off work. Jane insisted you make enough for her, too, didn't she?_

And there was the message from Jane, forwarding the link from Tom. She clicked through to access the file-share and began to skim the reminders of their high-school days.

And then she stopped, and felt her skin go cold.

* * *

"Melody Glass, who had once been Vicki Trevor and before that Cari Powers, stood with her hands clasped before her chest. The long silver chain of the pendant led over her thumb and swayed gently, perhaps with her pulse, perhaps only with the slight air currents in the quiet room. She knew that an incantation and an amulet should do nothing, that for all the surreal twists her life had taken, it was not a fantasy story. Yet she also knew that, if that were true, she would have been dead already."

Daria swallowed. "Halloween? It is I. I... stand in my gallery and hold your sigil. We need to talk."

For a moment, nothing.

Then, Daria heard a tapping at a window.

She wore the same raincoat, and she was drumming against the glass with a hard-boiled egg, breaking the shell into pieces.

Without speaking, Daria strode to the window, worked the gunmetal-gray latch handle and watched her clamber in, nibbling the egg as she did so.

"Hi," the detective said. "What's the matter?"

Daria returned to the middle of the gallery floor and picked up the tablet she had left there. "Either there's something you didn't tell me, or there's something you don't know." Her fingers tapped an unlock code onto the touchscreen, and she handed the device to the visitor.

Halloween regarded the tablet and took in the image it displayed.

"That is unexpected," she said.

Her index finger traced across the tablet screen, sliding the image aside, replacing it by another and then another.

Daria told her, "Those all date to a few days after your visit to Lawndale. I, for one, doubt I could have described what you looked like."

"And you weren't there to see this part. Fascinating." She handed the tablet back to Daria and began to pace about the gallery. "Fascinating," she repeated. "The most parsimonious explanation is that Jane was able to see us as well. Which raises the question of _how,_ and the more important question of why her involvement with the Dreaming never registered." She halted and turned to Daria. "Our scry-circles alerted us when _you_ became peripherally involved with Farrell. Why, then, did they not detect when _Jane_ entered into an actual business partnership, if she had been there for the Lawndale incident as well? The prospect of our systems being that unreliable is troubling." She extracted a candy cigar from a pocket and began to chew the end of it. "And how did she get pulled into that mess in the first place?"

"The way I remember it," Daria said, "Jane and Trent and I all went to Holiday Island. He played electric guitar in your band."

"Echoes of them," Halloween said, pacing again, now with a slouch in her step. "Projections from your mind. At least, that's what we thought."

"But if they weren't? If Jane and Trent were _there,_ like I was?"

"We should have known. We _would_ have known. _I_ would have known." She snapped her fingers. "Of course!" Pressing a knuckle to her forehead, she went on, "She wasn't _there,_ but _we_ were in Lawndale. _That's_ where she saw us. Those drawings, they're all of things that we did at night, when she could well have been dreaming."

"So just like I did, her mind hung around Lawndale and saw you three. And she remembered, and drew what she had seen."

"Yes! Which leaves the problem of why. Or how." She chewed down the cigar for a moment. "Tell me everything you remember about the day you had your wisdom teeth out."

"It was towards the end of the summer between tenth and eleventh grade. They put me under, carved four holes out of my head, and I woke up. My mouth was full of gauze. They had a scratchpad and a pencil, for if I wanted to ask anything. I wrote, `How does the sphygmomanometer work if you don't feel my wrist?' Then I faded out for a bit."

"Go on. How did you get home?"

"My father was there. I didn't realize until we were in the car and stopping at the video store that _both_ my parents were there, and that my mother was the one who'd brought me to the surgeon. Later, Dad told me that Mom had been there when I was first regaining consciousness, and they were pulling bloody gauze stuff out of my mouth. And she fainted dead away."

"So, your father had to come and collect you both."

"We stopped at the video store to get _2001_ and _Koyaanisqatsi_. I had said something about them sounding like good movies to watch while I was blasted on pain meds. We got home. I'm sure I was out of it long before HAL went on his killing spree." Daria's eyes widened. "Jane was there too!"

"Why?"

"She... wanted to get out of her house, for some reason. There was... Monique and the Harpies had come over to jam with Mystic Spiral. Yes. That's it. Watching movies with me sounded like a better use of her time, even if I were drooling."

"Oh, that is remarkable! She could have been there. While you were hallucinating and getting all mixed up in our business. She was there, and you brought her in. What you said to her brought her in."

"Wait. I did what?"

"You probably narrated all the way through your trance state. And the bond you two shared, that made her a part of it."

This seemed like a good time to sit down. Daria lowered herself to the gallery floor and stretched her legs out in front of her.

"We had spent all summer working on a project together," she said. "A silly little comic book. But it felt so _right._ It was so frivolous, and yet because we were doing it with each other, somehow it wasn't. We started because we wanted to imagine Lawndale being blown away by a hurricane. We kept going because we were... because we were doing something together that we could never have done separately. We were sharing the talents that almost nobody appreciated. We were taking each other seriously and, without planning on it, pushing each other to do things we hadn't thought we could do. That felt... _really good._ "

"Cookie?" inquired Halloween, offering a brown paper bag.

"They're not oatmeal raisin, are they?"

"Almond shortbread thumbdrop," Halloween replied.

Daria took a cookie and methodically bit her way around the dark chocolate dollop in the center.

Halloween said, "She's part of this now. Because of what you two shared. Something went wrong with the mechanisms that we use to protect the Dreaming, and we missed it. Maybe that was an accident. Or, maybe it was sabotage."

Daria bit into the chocolate.

"If it was our carelessness, then that's bad. If someone has been obscuring our senses, that's considerably worse." Halloween went to the window and drummed her fingers against the glass.

"Good cookie," Daria said. She gathered her legs under her and stood up. "I need to start making dinner for Saavik and Jane. Tell me..."

"Hmmm?"

"Do you like curry?"


End file.
